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Thunderbird is go!

So after pretty much a single day of using Thunderbird, Mozilla’s email client, I’ve permanently switched over to using it as my main client – after being a registered user of Ritlabs’ TheBat! for at least a decade. TheBat! has been reliable through the years, but has lacked a few features that I’ve always wished it had but that were never dealbreakers to the program’s continued use. I recall testing Thunderbird quite a while ago and finding it to have a very unfinished feel to it. But just as with Firefox, it apparently just needed a couple of years to mature and include some good user-sourced feature requests. Now, it’s awesome.

One of the things I really like about it is the unified inbox. Because I have multiple email addresses, it’s very useful to have a single virtual view of all of my email account inboxes so that I can read and reply without needing to click around in a folder tree, regardless of the accounts in which new mail has arrived. In addition, Thunderbird has the ability to create virtual views based on realtime "searches". So, for example, you can have a view of all your sent items, which consists of the folders named "Sent", "Sent Items" etc from not only POP3 accounts that have been sucked down into Thunderbird already, but also online-residing folders in IMAP accounts. In practice, what with my multiple Google accounts, this program is actually now allowing me to see sent items from literally years ago that I never knew were still hanging around – giving me the chance to delete and empty trash once and for all and feeding my voracious appetite for fastidious electronic organization in the process.

The addons are another bonus. Just as with Firefox, the program interfaces to an online app store containing plenty of plugins which modify/enhance/just basically add to the user experience. Silvermel is a very appealing skin that really makes me look forwarding to using the app. Am I becoming a glam-whore lately? Probably! The app store automatically detects when addons have been updated and you can update directly from within Thunderbird.

Apart from that, it’s business as usual for the program and I’d say it’s six of one, half dozen of the other versus TheBat!. The fact that I was able to import all of my emails from the other email client was a giant bonus. That was done through the use of a plugin. Betas are coming out for Thunderbird all the time, so in that sense it’s also on a slightly more frequent update schedule than TheBat!.

Anyway, that’s a wrap. Gotta go read and reply to my email.

Mozilla Thunderbird

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