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- 24) Final conclusion: After using it for a couple of
weeks at work, I've had entirely too much frustration with it
so I'm going back to Outlook Express. I am mostly loathe
to use evil MS warez, but I'm just not willing to suffer
the TBird UI right now.
- 23) It crashes.
- 22) I want it to use the traditional ">" instead of a colored "change
bar", but have yet to find a way to make it stop sucking.
- 21) When a letter's date is today, I want it to say "Date: Today 9:15
AM", not "Date: 9:15 AM".
- 20) When I use the "Reply All" button, it converts several of
the original To: fields into CC: fields. That. Is. Stupid.
- 19) They apparently do not understand what a good UI is like.
For example, when saving an attachment I get
this
overblown and broken dialog box (I'm the one that did the
defacement, that's not the broken-ness). It puts too much information
up, it is overwhelming, and it is broken because the file was
already totally saved and yet the progress bar is empty. Furthermore,
if the file was done being saved before the dialog box was even
opened (which is how it appeared to me) then why put up the
bloody dialog box with all that cruft? If you must put up
a dialog box, how about one that just says "The file was successfully
saved. " for crying out loud?
- 18) I came across
some helpful
notes about kicking Thunderbird in the head.
- 17) I love how I go to the
Thunderbird
web site and the search doesn't restrict itself to
Thunderbird. So I have to type the word "thunderbird" all
the time.
- 16) Argh! It is turning my ":-)" into obnoxious
yellow images! And I can't find how to stop it! Kill!
- 15) The icons in the Alt-Tab list do not differentiate
the various window purposes, so you have to visit
each in turn to figure out which was the Search
window etc. Note that Outlook Express did have
different icons (but they were kinda lame and confusing
and made me mad).
- 14) It bugs me that the pane which has the summary list of
messages in it adds new messages to the end, often so they
are off the bottom of the pane. So every time I get new email
I first have to scroll down to get everything on-screen.
Of course, I know that it would also really piss me off if it scrolled
up when new mail arrived because what if it did that just
when i was about to click on a particular message, and it
scrolled away from underneath me? I think what I'd like is
for there to be up to half a pane's worth of blank lines at the
of the list, rather than just 1.
- 13) I'm trying to use the Search functionality.
It really sucks! First, it is annoying to get
another search parameter. The UI is very different
from that for getting another header field
in the Compose window. The button you have to
press is far away from where you are looking.
Second, when I tell it
to order by date, it doesn't work. It rearranges
things, but I still end up with a complete
jumble of dates. Uh, yeah. More just painfully
blatent complete and utter lack of a clue
when it comes to usability. Also, it has no
good indication that the search is still
progressing. And, last but not least,
the labels for the radio buttons which
choose between 'anding' or 'oring' the
search criteria are not sufficiently
distinct - they differ by only 2
characters. God, hell. And picking
the folders to search? Double hell.
Hey, also, do you like the way it uses
the term "Sender" rather than "From"
in the search, the latter being what it shows when
viewing a letter?
- 12) I clicked on the Stop button in
Search. Did it stop? No, not until
much later. Did it tell me it would
try to stop? No. Does it all
completely and obviously suck? Yes.
- 11) Like the guy in Green Eggs and Ham,
I do not want my Compose window to put
To: targets on individual lines all the time.
I want to be able to write "To: fred, joe, sue"
and have it a) expand them properly and b)
leave them all on that line. (Unlike that
guy, I'm not changing my mind.)
- 10) The button says "Write" but the window
which appears has the title, "Compose." Yeah,
I'm sure this was all done be real professionals.
- 9) I completely hate the fact that there is nothing
in the list of possible docs that is called a
manual. There are FAQs and there are
Hints and Tips and and there is a step-by-step
tutorial, and there is a Knowledge Base,
and there are Forums and there is an IRC channel,
but what about a bloody online manual, with
a bloody index? They are all complete idiots.
- 8) It really annoys me that they write it Cc:
and not CC:, since it is an abbreviation.
- 7) There does not appear to be a "check recipients"
command or toolbar button. So as a new user I can't
quickly tell if Thunderbird wants me to use
commas (which I hope it does) or semi-colons (like
evil MS products) to separate destinations in the
header fields like To: and Cc:.
- 6) Thunderbird's toolbar buttons for things like Send and Spell
and Write are ridiculously poorly designed.
The minimum width is too small, and
the default width of the buttons is different across them all
(when they have icons associated with them). Totally trying
to make it unusable and frustrating, apparently?
- 5) Thunderbird doesn't just put To: and Cc: up automatically.
It only puts a To: line and then if you go to the next header
line it defaults to yet another To:. So then I manually have
to set it to Cc: by moving my hand from the keyboard to the
mouse and changing the value. So that utterly sucks.
- 4) I'm sad that Thunderbird keeps turning out to be a
stinking pile of poo compared to Outlook Express. The
latest: If you click on e.g.: the File menu to see it
and then move your mouse pointer over to the next menu,
the File menu will properly close and the Edit menu
will correctly appear. However, if you do that and
move the mouse pointer across a grayed-out menu title,
then the next active menu title you get to will not
open up. So you cannot 'browse' the menus looking for a function.
(The fact is, user interfaces suck and people have to do that
a lot, at least for the first 6 months of using and learning
the program.)
- 3) Thunderbird doesn't have a good indication
that it is working (over IMAP). When I delete things,
or when I move a bunch of items to another folder,
it doesn't give feedback anywhere near as good as
Outlook Express. Sad.
- 2) I think Thunderbird suffers from having
too many grouping/bounding boxes
in the UI.
- 1) Thunderbird's
FAQ (that's a local
copy because they might get around to fixing it and
then you won't believe me) is missing an entry: click
on "What's the keyboard shortcut for feature x?"
and it goes nowhere. Ha ha! I guess they aren't
using some powerful open source software that
actually knows how to double-check such things,
to make their web pages? Sheesh. I also like the fact
that they are wrong about the keyboard shortcuts
for Outlook Express; they say Del is to delete
a message and never mention Ctrl-D, which works
in my version of OE at least! Suck. Here's hoping
the keyconfig
extension will work. (How lame is it that you have
to restart the application to get a new extension
working?) So keyconfig doesn't remember the mappings
I'm setting for the Compose window. Terrific.
Last modified: Wed Jan 25 18:39:04 PST 2006