Why I Stopped Using Mozilla Thunderbird

I have been using Mozilla’s Thunderbird for my email on my Mac for more than two years now and it has served me adequately. It was quirky and quaint, but adequate.

Small annoyances would pile up, but I would ignore them in my devotion to Mozilla, open source, and an application that I had already configured to fit my needs.

Until the straw that broke the camel’s back. Thunderbird lost my attachments.

I had been using Thunderbird with IMAP email and was quite neutral about the experience until one day when I decided to move some of my mail from one folder to another. For those unfamiliar with IMAP, it hosts all your email on the server while keeping the client (Thunderbird) as synchronized with it as you want. You can choose to have all emails downloaded, or just headers, or whatever you want. The full email would be on the server and you could choose to see only what you please.

The move was miserable—Thunderbird lost a bunch of attachments to some of my emails. The little paper clip icon was still there next to the email “subject” but when I clicked on it, the paper clip went away and poof went the attachments.

I had a thought of switching from Thunderbird in the back of my mind for a while but this made it urgent. It also made all those little annoyances all that more irritating.

Like the default search. I had an extension to change the default search behavior so that it would support GMail-like search strings (e.g. from:Smith), but that shouldn’t be necessary. Searching through email should be first nature to a good email client.

And then there was the unreliable number of unread messages in my newsgroups. It always over-reported the number of messages that were unread in a newsgroup until I stopped paying attention to what it said.

Some issues are not entirely Mozilla’s fault, but they are still serious to me, like the lack of solid support for the Apple applications like iCal and Address Book.

So here’s what I did: I switched to Microsoft Entourage, and it is a fantastic application. It may not be for everyone, but after years of using Thunderbird it feels like a breath of fresh air. All the buttons I didn’t know I was missing were in the right place. All the little notifications and extra information it automatically provides about each email, and especially the way it handles attachments, is fantastic. With each attachment in each email you can choose whether to open, save, or remove it with a single click. No more dealing with the obscure attachment bar at the bottom of the message in Thunderbird. Entourage also uses Apple’s Address Book and has its own Calendar that syncs with iCal and a few more productivity tools.

I realize that a few of my gripes with Thunderbird could have been solved with an extension, customization, or something similar, but for an application like that I want it to be intuitive to begin with and become awesome with tweaks. It shouldn’t require tweaks just to become functional.

You may be wondering why I never tried Apple’s Mail: it doesn’t have NNTP support, which is a big deal for me. I don’t want a separate application for that. Also, the interface never felt natural to me.

I will miss Thunderbird for its strong developer community and a few nifty extensions. However, the extensions were never as big a deal for me in Thunderbird as they are in Firefox. Maybe it will mature in future versions, as I would gladly switch back and will be keeping an eye on its progress. Until then, Microsoft has my email.