I’ve been using Thunderbird as my email client for about 6 months now. Its been gradually driving me more and more crazy until I’ve finally reached the point where it is not worth the pain and I am going to uninstall and use something else. My new XPS M1210 will be arriving soon with all the Office 2007 Pro caper, so I am prepared to give the new Outlook 2007 a chance.

What annoys me about Thunderbird:

1. There is some kind of critical bug that completely wipes all of my account settings approximately once per month. On some lucky day of every month I will attempt to load up Thunderbird and it will tell me to Add a New Email Account via its New Account Wizard. I currently have 3 separate POP3 accounts, each have their own physical mail locations, mail folders and own custom settings - yep all gone. From reading into this problem, I have learned that you can manually re-add all of the lost accounts and then re-point Thunderbird to the old file locations which still exist on your hard drive, then change all of your settings back. This gets your old data back, although it takes me approximately 15 minutes of complete piss farting around and inspires me to write a blog post about it (It just happened again this morning). Normally I just say “Oh there is no better mail client out there, I’ll just manually re-add all the settings and accounts back in and be done with it”. But not this morning, no this is ridiculous guys.
2. The default settings that the application comes with are very left-wing alternative hardcore and annoying to most users. By default, for each of your separate email accounts, it comes with a setting that starts your reply text off at the bottom of the email thread. So when you send the message, the recipient can’t see your reply until they scroll to the bottom. I understand this is the way that a lot of hardcore unix haX0rs prefer to operate from some old newsgroup days or whatever, but in the modern world where so many things have become adopted standards for business tools, its just totally opposed to what 99% of users prefer. Just bite the bullet and swallow your hardcore pride and make the default setting “Start my reply Above”.
3. When you COPY a file and PASTE it into an email, Thunderbird pastes in some useless text link, rather than physically attaching the file itself like Outlook does. This is just annoying and useless. Each time I realise I have done the same thing, I have to delete the messy link it placed in there and manually go through the menu to find the Attach option and then use the Browse button. I’m sure there is some cool shortcut for doing this, but the thing with intuitive applications is that it shouldn’t be a mystery to work out how to use common features. You shouldn’t need to study up or search on the web to find a nice way of doing something, it should be obvious and standard.
4. It comes with a default setting to play a loud BEEP when an email arrives. Now, each time it loses my settings, this beep setting is restored. I normally have my laptop hooked up to speakers playing music. So I am always really happy to be deafened by Thunderbird’s annoying beep blaring over the top of the music, scaring the hell out of me, just because an email arrived and its settings were wiped by its own bugs.
5. I’m really appreciative of the Thunderbird start page which just visually bloats up my inbox, but its just another thing that you need to turn off to customise Thunderbird to be nice to use.
6. When you accidentally open up the wrong message, pressing escape does absolutely nothing. Its such a standard for that to prompt to close the window.
7. Messages are forwarded by default as attachments, not inline. Just another setting to manually change before the program is usable. Otherwise, you get a lot of bounce backs for forwarding .eml messages as this gets flagged as spam.

I definitely think that Thunderbird is a very clean, efficient email client that has a LOT of potential. The things that annoy me really are pretty easily fixed. It needs another month or so of refinement in their development labs and a new version pushed out. If they can fix all of these things, then I would come back in a flash. But right now, its just taking up way too much of my time, simply to read my email!

Tags: internet

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 7th, 2007 at 12:53 pm by aaron. You can leave a response