Mozilla Thunderbird sucks
Really, Thunderbird is a terrible mail client. I'd been using Outlook for about 5 years when I first tried it, so I thought maybe the reason I didn't like it was simply because it was different, in which case I should continue to use it to get used to it. One year on I still hate it and recently it just ate half my mail. So I'm going back to Outlook.
While downloading a large message using POP over a slow connection recently, the download bar (slowly progressing from 0% to about 50% at the time of the crash) simply went away (without error). Clicking "Get mail" button again did nothing (without error). Restarting the program showed the "Inbox" to be blank for a very long time, but it seemed to be doing something, and after about 1-2 minutes the list of messages appeared. But only the mails received between the time I started using Thunderbird and about mid 2006-10 were there. Mails from mid 2006-10 to now (mid 2007-04) are just gone. So that'll be the mailbox corrupted then. Imagine you relied on Thunderbird as the only storage place for all your mail. Well, thankfully I don't. And thankfully I won't even be using Thunderbird for one of the storage places for my mail in the future.
Here are the reasons I didn't like Thunderbird from the beginning.
- When you click "reply", the cursor inviting you to type a response to the quoted mail is at the bottom of the mail, not the top. It turns out there is a preferences option where you can change that, but it took me about 6 months to find it.
- The HTML mail composer sucks. You have the cursor blinking away somewhere, press a key expecting the character to be inserted where the cursor is, but no. The cursor suddenly moves somewhere different (e.g. a line down) and inserts the character there.
- If you send a rich text message, it asks you "do you want to send this mail as plain text (recommended), html, or both?". Text is rarely so long that the bandwidth required for a multipart/alternative would be a problem. And multipart/alternative is there so you, as the sender, don't have to know what formats the recipient can read. So this dialog box is just broken. Also: why is plain text recommended, do we want to be stuck in the 70s forever? Let's all go to the disco and send (recommended) plain text emails using Firefox.
- In Outlook, if you click "send" and you are offline, the message is stored locally temporarily. As soon as a connection is available, it is sent. With Thunderbird, however, the situation is more complex. At the time of sending, you have to select "send" (which yields an error if you are offline), or "send later" (which is available when you are online, even though you'd never want it). When you go online you have to select "send emails now", as opposed to that happening automatically. However, I thought I could make this all go away when I found the option "if you go online, Thunderbird can send offline emails immediately". I clicked that but it didn't work. It turned out "go online" referred to the Thunderbird menu options "go online". If, every time I connected to the internet, I had to go through each application and use its menu option "go online", well, that would be a bad situation. Probably why other applications don't work like that.
- Search results are unsorted. Search happens in the background (good) and adds mails to the search results window as it continues and finds them. If you click on a column heading in the results, e.g. "date", to sort the (initially unsorted) search results, then during search (as more emails are found) they are simply added to the bottom of the search results. So you have to click the column heading again, to do a sort including the newly found emails.
- The UI to do search is terrible. If you open the drop-down with the keyboard, allowing you to select "sender", "recipient" (i.e. which field must match in the search), use the cursor keys to select the field you want, then press tab to move to the text field (to type the value of the field which much match, which works in other applications), the drop-down list of fields closes, but the field you had selected is forgotten.
- Full-text search takes ages. No indexing. Why?
- If you are composing an email, and want to send it to someone whose address you've forgotten, you can go to another window, find a mail from them, right click their address and say "add to address book". Go back to your compose window and try and use the address book: it doesn't contain the new entry. You have to close the compose window, open a new open, copy/paste the entire body and all other recipients over, then the new window knows about the current address book.
- Emails you send using the HTML editor are in Times (not Helvetica/Arial as in Outlook), which makes ones emails look terrible, and also marks one out as a person using "strange" non-Outlook technology, to all ones recipients.
SMTP is not new. POP is not new.Win32 is not new. Surely in the time between the creation of those technologies and now, one must have been able to do better than this.
for absolutely no reason whatsoever sending an email with SMTP authentication takes ages . It simply says … connected to smtp.mail.xxx and no network activity :X
That’s why MS Outlook RULES!!!
I thought I was the only one who thought that Thunderbird sucks — and I thought it was me or my PC or my Internet connection because, well, Thunderbird gets such good press.
I have to go to my email provider’s web email page to download everthing first, even a small e-mail, because Thunderbird takes minutes to download, ever so slowly. It’s not the folders not being compacted, as I’ve done that hundreds of times. It seems that you can’t have many archived messages because a new installation starts out fast and then gets incredibly slow over time. That defeats a big purpose of having it.
Yes, I will dump it finally. Version 2 is no better than 1. Meanwhile, the Thunderbird Emperor has no clothing on!
Agreed, agreed. I had heard TBird was the best thing ever, but it lost a LOT of my mail due to corrupted files. I can’t believe I’m doing this, but it looks like I’m going to enter the Belly of the Beast and start using MS Outlook.
Oh — and another complaint: Thunderbird won’t export mail to Outlook, or pretty much anything else. Luckily, good people have built workarounds (and you DON’T need to pay for them, like some other options require):
http://blog.nektra.com/main/2009/04/14/export-messages-and-folders-from-thunderbird-to-outlook-outlook-express/
I used thunderbird for a week and changed back to outlook express today because I have received my e-mails with delays. Sometimes I have seen a 2-day old e-mail appearing on my mail box. Now I wonder if I lost any e-mails from my clients or friends.
I’ve been using Thunderbird, MS Outlook, and several other mail systems concurrently (for different reasons) for years. The bottom line is that Outlook has by far outperformed the others. Thunderbird doesn’t even send replies to a large number of emails. It just gives you an error message which is very frustrating.
I don’t really like Outlook, but it is thousand times better than shitty Thunderbird. Mozilla is shit, and firefox is worthless compared to Opera as well. Opera and Evolution (Linux) are both much better mail clients.
My father has thunderbird and is fed up with bullshit unviewable attachments which can’t be send foward separately unitl saving all of them on hdd. FUCK THUNDERBIRD!
It sucks, get the Bat and rediscover email again!
I agree it sucks! I haven’t been able to get it working properly for months and the reason for that is how illogical it is. Some programmers like to imprint their ego on their work and you will especially notice this if you try to change ANYTHING in Thunderbird. Repeat after me, programmer:
“Simplicity is grace! Intuitive is good!”
Tbird sorry to say is not to manage (so far). It eats the emails up sometimes and asks when sending – constantly if it is ok that it could not be put in sent folder. Later I sometimes see it has put it there anyways. Sometimes not.
Yes sucks.
Yes Tbirs is sucks. It ate some of my emails. It puts sent mail sometimes in sent and other times bugs me ‘could not put in sent’ and then (sometimes only) it is put in sent ANYWAYS. The folders with the many options (I like it – BUT) they are rather confusing! I never know where is what. And I keep finding emails I have double-deleted weeks ago! I am sorry to say that I may have to switch back to Outlook Express.
Try to switch servers with imap. you give your account a new server address, connect and – boom! all your emails are gone, gone gone. there is no proper way to transfer your locally stored imap emails to the new server. yes, without a warning, you lose everything.
The whole messy system of profile folder deep in the guts of the system, and local folders and blablabla is such an utter nonsensical botheration. You can import Mail from Outlook, Eudora… but can you import mails from Thunderbird? No!
Why not, gdamnit, at install time, ask the user where to store the emails and profiles nad all, just in one nicely trackable folder of your choice? Then you would know: I make a backup of this folder and everything is safe.
I want to be able to export and import entire accounts, incl, setting and mails and all. That’s clear and safe.
Thunderbird is NOT a safe email client. Too much risk of losing everything. I have used it for many years, so I know what I am saying. Developers don’t get this. My patience is at an end. – I am with you, guys: Thunderbird sucks – time, nerve and emails.
I managed to get it to import my mail from outlook but it corrupted EVERY attachment. Now I have lost those. It is worthless.
Yes, it sucks. Everything from how it shows progress to how it marks spam. I was hoping it would make all the Outlook pain go away, but no, it was worse. I just use webmail for everything now.
Lately it seems that all of Mozilla’s products work best if they’re not used at all. They make beautiful icons, and that’s about the extent of their greatness. Thunderbird sucks and so does Firefox.
Today is the day when I kick Thunderbird for good.
About two months ago, for some strange reason, the “sent” folder never displays the last couple of days’ worth of email.
(Something wrong with its infamous indexing, I am sure.)
Today, a very important email, with a work attachment (for which I had stayed up all night and well into the morning, so I could deliver it on time), never reached its destination.
I set the priority to “highest”, as I always do, and sent it on its way.
No errors, no nothing, happened to alert me to possible failure of delivery.
But a few minutes ago the people who had been expecting my email at 10 a.m. (I sent it two minutes before 10 a.m.) emailed me that they never received it.
And because I cannot acess the latest sent email, I cannot even prove that I did send it!
That’s it.
Farewell, Mozilla.
Stunned, shocked at the list of Thunderbird problems I ran into, including the program’s absolute refusal to let me conduct the simple act of changeing my email password. Complete list of negatives is too numerous to mention, but I have to admit that I set the program up on a co-worker’s computer here in this office two months ago she swears by it, claims it works perfectly and is superior to Outlook in every way. To which I shake my head and reply, “Adios, Thunderbird, it was definitelt NOT good to know you.” Vaya con dios.
You’re absolutely right… thunderbird stinks to high heaven. But if you’re using Outlook and sending rich text emails… you are a fuckwit.
Yeah, Agreed it is bad – In the way they handle e-mail accounts. I just wanted my new one to work, and it would not sort of swtich new both pop and smtp servers, even thou I sat the new account as a standard, hoping to have all the new connections in order, but just the new smtp server would change from the old setup, So i needed to get rid of the old I thought, and deleted it in hope it would be able to use the new account entirely. – But then all the old mails got vanished as well…. surprise, I thought the mails would be intact afterwards, but noooo. And it was also freaking almost impossible to get the old stuff to work, I had to then start the automatically install, then abort it while it was working, and then change the numbers of the ports, then it would work, Not if I sat it up manually.. So troublesome to setup accounts in that e-mail client. But, it was swift and accurate to do setup the new account, It did what it was supposed to in that regard, only a bit of a nasty surprise it got to delete all of my old messages.
Thunderbird used to be fantastic. I have the feeling it is suffering from the same malady as Gnome – sabotage by M$ plants. I really can’t think of a better reason for great products to suddenly become so crappy in the same way that M$ has always been crappy.
Evolution has become more enticing, although I don’t need all that it provides.