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I have been using IE-6 and OE-6 so long.Keeping in mind the problem of
security have switched to Firefox and am extremely pleased by it.
The same unfortunately can't be said about T-Bird specially as a
newsreader.
Would you please give your opinions comparing the various mail clients as
regards both mail handling as well as aNewsreader with offline capabilities.
I would prefer a single client to do both jobs.
Keeping in mind that I am a newbie,opinion from the experts would be
welcome.
Thanks in advance,
Jaycee
I use Pegasus mail as my main email client. Xnews for News.
My main concern was how well Thunderbird handled multiple POP3 and SMTP
accounts since I have quite a few.
Prior to 0.8, TB forced you to use several different Accounts for each
POP3 definition, nothing wrong with this, until I realized, each account
would have it's own separate hierarchy of folders. This meant having
multiple inbox, junk, deleted ,sent etc folders -one for each account.
Talk about complicated.
I read that 0.8, now has this option of a global inbox and this tempted
me to try again. Now when you set up a account, you can choose to use
the global inbox, and you can do this multiple times for each account,
so everything goes into one folder set. Perfect!
Even though TB now as only one global inbox and one set of folders for
all accounts, it still is very accounts/ID oriented.
If "Work" and "Home" Identities/Accounts are placed in the global inbox,
TB still maintains separate filter sets for the mail downloaded by these
2 identities. That threw me off for a while.
You can also customize TB to show a column indicating which Identity
downloaded the mail.
Pro : You can easily tell the identity that downloaded each mail. That
is not possible in Pegasus mail. Sure , one identity polls all the rest,
but it's not easy to figure out which email identity downloaded each
mail. Looking at headers will help or using filter rules based on the
stmp header to color-code mail might be even better, but these are rough
workarounds.
Con: There is no global filter in Thunderbird that works across all
Identities! It's cool that you can have TB handle Spam (found by a
suitable filter rule) downloaded from the work folder different from the
Spam downloaded from the Home account, but what if you want to handle
all Spam in the same way? Quite time consuming to manually enter each
rule 6 times (say).
SMTP.
Another nice feature about Thunderbird is that when you reply to a email
, it will use the SMTP ID associated with the ID/Account that downloaded
it automatically.
Seems obvious, but Pegasus doesn't do it. Coupled with the fact that
it's often hard to figure out which account downloaded the mail,
figuring out which SMTP id to use to reply can be a struggle sometimes.
What if you don't want to use the SMTP settings configured? Here the
extensions "Virtual Identity" and "Show SMTP server" helps.
The interface for configuring SMTP needs to be improved though. By
default when setting up a identity, all identities use the default SMTP
server. You can't change it, until you finish the setup, go to
tools--->account settings, then scroll right to the bottom to the single
line that says "Outgoing server(SMTP)". It's tucked right at the bottom
below all the accounts, instead of being together with each Account
settings.
I'm quite happy with other aspects of Thunderbird
It's much cooler looking. The search bar at the top is very useful, in
fact it reminds me a bit of gmail. Being able to define "views" is all
very good
It lacks many of the more powerful features of Pegasus mail, for example
Tb's filter rules is much more limited, no regular expressions and
limited actions set, ability to associate filter sets when
opening/closing folders, filter set for read mail in the inbox etc.
Similarly, you can customise each Indentity a lot more in Pegasus mail
(eg to say "poll no more than once every x minutes" for example,
selective download of mail based on age of mail or size of mail, to use
server site filtering to name just a few). For basic users the ability
to check mail every once x minutes is more than sufficient however I
suspect.
The bayesian filter is not as good (in terms of missing lots of spam) as
what you can get from a standalone, so if you really need strong
antispam protection you probably will use a seperate spam solution.
There are a few other quirks I'm used to from Pmail that I hope to see
in TB, and I was hoping TB extension range would be as wide as Firefox,
but sadly there are probably no more than 50 extensions for TB. Most of
them, minor ones.
Things I hope to see sometime include
1) Ability to highlight folders which last received mail with a
different color. Making folders bold for unread mail is well and good,
but when you get a notification of a new mail, and your filters kick in
and move them to a folder, you wouldn't know where it went if you have
unread mail in several folders.
2) Being able to right click and select "Select all" or "invert
selection in the folder
3) Blocking of all remote objects not just images
No doubt, I will find more.
I'm going to try it for a while more, it's draws you in, with it's
beautiful UI, simple options, and it's handling of multiple accounts is
already better than pegasus mails! Migration of old mail is also not a
problem with Thunderbird, since you can easily convert pegasus mailboxes
to mbx format and just move it to the thunderbird folders.
Still, I just wish the community of developers of thunderbird extension
was more active......
