How wonderfull Mozilla Firefox (the browser) is. We all know that. Or should know. On the other hand I don’t know about you, but I think Mozilla Thunderbird (the mail client) sucks.
I keep using it on Windows, as it’s “open” and, well, just a bit of good enough, but especially because I didn’t manage to find something better and at least as free/open on Windows yet. The thing is, you keep hearing from a lot of people how wonderfull this Thunderbird project is. And I really don’t understand why so little people aren’t annoyed by the same things I dislike.

For starters, I keep my mail on an IMAP server. So I like good IMAP support in my mail client, which is problem number one. Thunderbird is really bad for IMAP. You don’t always get notifications for new mail in folders other than Inbox (I use procmail), or you have to ‘get Mail’ manually to at least get the header of it. In some folders I have to go offline and again online to force a sync to get the headers and the body to read the mail.
Next, I use OpenLDAP to keep my address book on my server. Whereas Evolution and even more KMail don’t have any problems to show all email addresses of one contact, Thunderbird only selects the first one in his queries. I’m now not going to rant anymore about not being able to edit or add ldap entries, which is no problem in plain Linux clients.

So, don’t come and tell me Thunderbird is the big bad thing who makes Open Source rock, because IMHO it doesn’t. It’s so bare on functionalities compared to pure linux clients, it is a shame. Even the Outlook family has more features, but bad example of course, because those ‘other features’ are useless and bad 🙂

Disclaimer: I never tried Thunderbird on Gnu/Linux. I don’t think it will be better over there.