I am a diehard Mozilla Thunderbird user. Even though I’ve tried out just about every single email there is (Yahoo! Mail, Gmail and Hotmail included), and just about every single mail client there is, I always go back to Thunderbird. It’s because it does the job that good.

But unfortunately I can’t say that anymore.

Now I have to say I’m a diehard Thunderbird 2 user.

Before I get into why that is, bear in mind when it comes to email, people are fiercely loyal when it comes to their mail clients. Some Windows users positively refuse to give up Outlook Express 6. Many Mac users absolutely will not use anything but Apple’s Mail app. And there are even some diehard Eudora users out there still. All of this stuff (including Apple’s Mail) are programs built upon very old code – but working and good code. Each one of those mail apps are super-fast and work without complaint.

Thunderbird 2 is the exact same way. Light, quick on its feet and stupidly easy to use. It’s mail the way it was meant to be. It works flawlessly in Windows, Mac or Linux.

Thunderbird 3 on the other hand is a totally different story.

The good stuff

The global search is by far 3′s best feature. No question. To find mail anywhere in any folder, just start typing in the search field. Search by anything. This search is amazing.

Originally I wasn’t too hot on the idea of tabs in my email, but the way they’re implemented in 3 works quite well. It is better to have an email open up in a tab rather than a new window. The awesome global search I mentioned a moment ago makes extensive use of these tabs and does so well.

T-bird 3 also takes advantage of Windows 7′s search. What this means is that you can locate emails without even having to open Thunderbird. Just click the start logo and type. And yes, you can turn it off (which I did because I like to keep mail searches solely within the client).

The new icon sets do look better than 2′s did – particularly the icons for attachments and starred mails.

The relocation of certain buttons to be within the reading pane window are very convenient. I did like that the reply button was in a place that, for lack of a better term, felt better.

The bad stuff

T-bird 3 tries in its best effort to automatically set up an email account by guessing what servers you would use. Unless you’re using a very popular email service this is a complete waste of time, because it takes longer for that process to complete compared to manually entering in the POP/IMAP/SMTP server information yourself.

The "smart folders" 3 uses make no sense whatsoever. I quickly dumped that for the older standard tree-style listings instead, easily done by clicking an arrow at the top of the list.

You would assume the new "Archive" feature would follow the date of emails for proper date-based archival. It doesn’t. If you "archive" a mail from 2008, guess where it lands? In the 2009 folder. This makes the feature worthless. I can do the same thing with a drag-and-drop in T-bird 2.

But even with this bad stuff, I was still set on using this client. But then there were two things that were total deal-breakers.

Unfinished product

There were several instances I found where things just simply didn’t work.

One that really stuck out was the F8 shortcut. This is a toggle function in T-bird to turn off/on the reading pane. I use it quite a bit. It would not work unless I specifically clicked the View menu first, then clicked again, then it would work. Very annoying.

If you add in columns with information that justifies itself to the right side (like "Size") and place that on the right side, there isn’t any padding. The text slams to the right border and makes some text unreadable no matter how you position it.

Unstable

On an attempt to double-click a tiny-sized email to open it in a tab, T-bird crashed. I’m not kidding. Crashed. Never have I had T-bird do this to be before with an official release. It crashed so hard I had to force-quit it Windows style via the Task Manager.

T-bird 3 for no apparent reason jumped to over 100,000 K of memory usage – even when it was not indexing and just sitting there. Most email apps will use 20,000 to 30,000 K (which T-bird 2 did) even when loaded with add-ons and never exceed that resource. There was literally no reason 3 had to be this chunky on resource whatsoever.

On attempt to mass-select emails where you click a mail, hold SHIFT and press the PageDown key – even with the reading pane off, T-bird 3 stuttered and was flaky on execution. It wasn’t even rendering any emails for view other than the list. What was it "thinking" about? That question goes unanswered.

Was it a "Windows thing"?

I was getting so desperate to figure out what was going wrong with T-bird 3 that I entertained the idea that maybe somehow it was Windows 7 messing it up, because there was no possible way Mozilla would release something this bad.

T-bird 2 never, repeat, never had a problem in Win 7. Or XP for that matter.

No matter what I did, T-bird 3 was just a sluggish beast of an app that couldn’t even handle a simple POP account properly. The unfinished interface, the stuttering, pausing, memory munching.. it was all horrible. No amount of shutting down other apps, rebooting or otherwise fixed it.

After I reinstalled T-bird 2, I crossed my fingers actually hoping it would screw up so I could blame it on Windows 7.

Alas, T-bird 2 worked flawlessly like it always did. It wasn’t a Windows thing. It was a T-bird thing.

I can only pray that other T-bird 3 users didn’t have as bad of an experience as I did.

Speaking of which, if you currently use Thunderbird 3 no matter what your OS (Win/Mac/Linux), please feel free to post a comment on your experience with the software. Hopefully it was a good one, because in all honesty I truly want to be wrong about 3 here.

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