May 28, 2004

Trying Thunderbird

I love Microsoft Office Outlook. It is an outstanding piece of software. The UI is easy to use, the integration of email, contacts, and calendar is great -- it just works.

Well, mostly. It just works great with Exchange email accounts (and probably with POP accounts), but the IMAP support is, well, less than great. It basically works, but then has weird connectivity problems sometimes. It also, like most IMAP clients I've ever used in my life, has fairly miserable offline support (you can read and write email, but can't move from one folder to another).

Recently, after reading a post from another MS employee about IMAP, I tried Mozilla Thunderbird. The fact that almost all of the shortcut keys are different than Outlook was annoying, but I could probably live with that. The things that really drove me nuts were:

  • You can configure it for offline work, but then it doesn't actually seem to download any of the email. Instead, you can right-click on each folder you want to download, choose 'properties', choose 'offline settings', and then click 'download mail'. Umm ...
  • The email server I use has a self-signed SSL certificate. Outlook whines everytime I open it about how it's not signed by a recognized authority and asks if I want to keep using it. Thunderbird whines when I open it, then whines again periodically. I can send an email, it pops a dialog warning me that I might be using a bad cert, then I can send a few more emails without any dialogs, then I'll send another one and get the dialog popped up again. Umm ...

So ... back to Outlook for me.

Posted by Mike at May 28, 2004 11:20 PM