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Thunderbird Blog

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.