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A Pointed Critique of Thunderbird 3's Performance Compared to v.2
PerfProtector writes "Did you recently install Thunderbird 3 or upgrade from Thunderbird 2 to Thunderbird 3? Did you notice any severe slowdown in your machine or a major decrease in its performance? Well, many people around the world encountered these problems. We wrote a technical analysis about the severe problems that are caused by Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail client. These problems include anomalous usage of CPU, memory, hard disk and Internet bandwidth. You can read the full analysis, including several graphs that show how bad the situation is and what went wrong from Thunderbird 2 to Thunderbird 3. For example, while CPU utilization of Thunderbird 2 is usually between 0% to 10%, with an average of 0.3%, Thunderbird 3 CPU utilization is between 5% to 80%, with an average of 30% — 100 times more than Thunderbird 2. In addition, during long periods of time, Thunderbird 3 used more than 50% of the overall CPU resources.This behavior slows dramatically the whole machine." It's worth noting that this analysis comes from developers who have developed a (freeware) tool they claim will improve Thunderbird's performance, but they explain also how to do so with manual changes.
I have not really seen this behavior, but have seen it get stuck doing some kind of indexing forever, or at least until I restart Thunderbird.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
Nope.
Did I notice any slowdown at all?
Nope....
Solutions for problems that (to me) don't exist...
Seems like this only affects
A) People with very large mailboxes
B) People using IMAP
C) A + B
I haven't encountered any problems with Thunderbird 3.
Thunderbird is the only mail client I use. I did not notice any slow down after version 3...
I thought thunderbird3 was faster over all. Even if normal operations were a little more sluggish, the increased search speed would make me not mind.
I run two instances of Thunderbird 3.0 here, with two separate profiles (personal and work). Overall, my CPU 96% idle at most times. that's even with Chrome and Opera sessions open. More often I find that Opera's plugin wrapper freaks out and wildly thrashes on one of my cores. Can't say I've ever seen Thunderbird consume huge amounts of CPU time other than when I've asked it to do some massive operation (some operation on hundreds to thousands of e-mails). Even searching my entire mailbox (personal or work) doesn't cause it to consume much if any CPU time.
Yes, storing and providing full text search over a large pile of email consumes resources ... duuuh?
Also they're measuring the performance of Thunderbird while converting to the new system, not in its steady state. This is like complaining that Firefox uses a lot more CPU importing settings from IE than IE uses when looking at your home page.
Their claim as to how long it took to do the full text indexing of the mail seems dubious to me. I've got a similar amount of mail, and the time it took to index was more like minutes, not days.
-Cheetah
I don't have a particularly large mailbox (5,000 emails), but I do use IMAP, and noticed no slowdown whatsoever. I do have a Core i5 processor so CPU usage probably isn't as noticeable to me as it would be for someone running a P4, but as I post this Thunderbird has been open for a couple weeks straight, and CPU usage is right around 0%, peaking at 15% when I am actively opening emails and organizing stuff.
I also noticed no slowdown, and I get pretty heavy e-mail traffic. Still if that many people are affected, I expect a patch soon.
Nothing lasts forever but the certainty of change.
In my humble experience, Thunderbird 2 was all ready much slower than Outlook Express (the switch was reversed after two weeks). Sounds like I'll be stuck with OE for a while longer.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Would be nice to mention that the increases are due to use of search indexing and/or IMAP account synchronization (especially with a large amount of e-mail). They don't do a comparison of what happens when you turn those off which I think would be more useful.
On a side note I was bored with the apparently stagnation of Thunderbird (I couldn't even find a good Aero Glass extension that worked during the 3.1 beta) I tried Windows Live Mail. It was interesting up until the point where it refused to show any mail from one of my accounts and insisted it wasn't failing. At least Thunderbird actually worked...
Switched one of my machines to Linux and am using Evolution which is actually quite nice... the account setup was far more pleasant and simple than Thunderbird or WLM and both my accounts worked fine.
Long ago, in the days of Netscape 6/7/8, the mail client of what was later Mozilla Suite (now SeaMonkey) was absolutely fantastic in terms of performance. The "new" standalone Thunderbird as introduced was horribly slow by comparison, and has only gotten substantially slower over time, even on the same hardware with roughly the same level and rate of messages. I haven't tried SeaMonkey recently, but several years ago it seemed an order of magnitude faster than Thunderbird. Does anybody know how Mozilla managed to make the standalone product so slow?
This is why all software you use must be open source, this wouldn't happen if people were able to get in and see the code that is actually causing the problems
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
It can go into orbit!
Thunderbird 2 is heavy and can only go supersonic!
There's no contest! What planet are you guys on?
Link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbirds_machines
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"At first, I was momentarily shocked that I wasn't the only one that caught that, until I remembered this is a website full of CompSci's and pretty much all we do is hunt down off-by-one-bugs.
I suspect you are 99 times more pedantic than the article writer :)
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
Actually, 30% is only 99 times more than 0.3%. If you wanted to use the 100 figure, you'd need to say "100 times that of Thunderbird 2".
ummm what math are you using?
You can't compare the two. Thunderbird 3 is a space vehicle and Thunderbird 2 operates in the Earth's atmosphere.
Of course 2 will be s-s-s-slower.
H. K. Hackenbacker
Thunderbird 2 is a heavy lift loader VTOL craft with a large payload bay.
Thunderbird 3 is an orbit capable single stage rocket that could land in its vertical takeoff position.\
http://www.dan-dare.org/FreeFun/Thunderbirds/ThunderbirdsGallery.htm
somebody had to do it.
Almost every message above this one (that I have read at this time) is a prime example of what people hate about nerds (and by extension much of OSS forums/support).
They built MF'ing graphs and detailed analyses of the issue. It is obvious that *something* is seriously broken.
From the comments it is apparent that few clicked through to the article ( "I can't reproduce it, sucks to be you" or "stupid n00b ought to know better" or "Thunderbird? Meh.") and those that may have just decided "too long, did not read".
It is goddamned Digg.com with a different color scheme.
If a conversation of the issue is to be found... it will be buried under a mountain of hubris.
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
The graphs are nice, but they don't tell the whole story.
What builds?
I have noticed severe memory leaks with Mozilla apps not at stable release level.
TFA by 'Perf Protector' says 'a beta tester' is providing the data - from an 'infected' Windows machine, apparently in a corporate environment.
Coincidentally(?) 'Perf Protector' is the tool used to generate the graphs as well as the handle of the poster. Is this a soft anti-Mozilla Slashvertisement for a Windows performance monitoring tool?
Seriously, they require your computer to go everywhere you do. Web email is the way to go.
Plus all the thunderbird users are annoying because they send messages every coupe years about their email changing because they changed ISPs.
One web-based email account fan fix all that.
If your internet is out -either at the provider or your house, then what good is email anyway?
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Now Tbird (3) seems to spend all its time indexing something. I have no idea why — I didn't ask it to, and it's slowing down the whole operation, whatever about its use of memory and other problems.
It has certainly slowed down, and sometimes when it stops to think, the screen greys out for a minute or so (this is a rather old machine).
What happened to the fast and effective mailer we used to have? Fortunately I still keep a copy of Elm...
You will be sorely missed.
Anybody else think this was a story about Thunderbird 3 vs Thunderbird 2?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
As above.
http://slashdot.org/users.pl?op=edithome
Authors: timothy
Uncheck..
I also use Thunderbird 3 for 2 pop mailboxes and 1 imap mailbox (with about 8 email addresses in aggregate). No slowdown or resource-hogging has been observed. It appears just as snappy as Thunderbird 2 was, but with a few new features.
FYI, this is not on a multi-core speed-demon PC. We run Thunderbird on a 7-year-old Pentium-M laptop (Ubuntu 10.04).
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
The two proposed changes in the article are to :
- disable the global indexer
- disable caching of messages to the local computer
It should come as no surprise that these two features increase cpu load and bandwidth consumption respectively...
The graphs are only showing the first 48 hours after install and account setup. It mentions that it took 3 days, which is more than 48 hours.
What is the long term view? If I start TB2 and TB3 and let them run a week, what does it look like after the initial indexing and everything? Let them index and everything, then turn them off for 24 hours and turn them back on?
To me it is like showing my car gets only 1-2 MPG when I am stuck in traffic(stop and go, at a red light or something), ignoring that 99% of the time I am not in that state.
the key part of the phrase is more than.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
0.3*99 ; "99 times"
29.7
29.7+0.3 ; "more than 0.3" <-- you left this step out
30.0
The BIGGEST pain in the ass of all this was TB 3.0.4 , which would cause a mail file explosion on existing 2.0 profiles. TB 3.0.3 did not do this!!!!
Its quite amazing to see TB mail files that increment up to the remainder of your free HD space over the period of 24 hours. Starting out with 100+GB free space the day before and wondering why your XP, or Win 7 machine is at a stand still with 0 free space gets a quick trouble call when the user, or BOSS, can't do ANYTHING!
TB as gotten better, but, I have users (the Boss) who WILL NOT move to 3. EVER! It's been blacklisted by him and we now have to find something else for him to use, despite any fixes that TB 3 releases in the fture. (presently he's on TB 2, which was EOL'd...)
Yes, he's stubborn, but he seemingly has NO downtime. Ever. Yes, EVER!
The only thing I didn't like about Thunderbird 3 was that the calendar plugins all stopped working. I like having a calendar integrated with my email client. But I just went to Google's calendar and imported my last calendar file from Thinderbird into it, and all was well. It's not as nice, but it works.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
Note the 'more'. It is 99 times 'more', and thus a 100 times the 0.3 figure.
Thunderbird 2 was a big fat cargo carrier. Thunderbird 3 was a big sleek rocket. Off course it will be faster. Unless the guy operating the marionette strings falls asleep or something.
What's more surprising is that several times in the past I've had people here reply that I'm wrong, that 100 times more than 0.3 really is 30. Usually once I give examples like "Well, how many times more than 0.3 is 0.3?" they see their error.
100 times more:
y = x + 100x
y= 101x
100 times as much:
y = 100x
Make sense now?
I was one of the last of my friends to give up the desktop mail client. I was an email packrat and kept everything, archiving off messages once in a while. I have archives going back to 1995 using the predecessor to MS Outlook and the earliest Netscape offerings. But once I moved my domain mx record to Google mail a couple years ago I dumped the clients and haven't looked back. I've felt completely liberated ever since. Using one IMAP mailbox accessible from browsers and mobile apps anywhere is the way to go. The only disadvantage I can see for some is off-line reading. I thought it might be an issue for me but it hasn't been.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
I use Thunderbird 3.1.2 with a pair of IMAP accounts. I've noticed the following:
1. The Archive folders shouldn't have "unread" messages in them. This causes strange bugs where Thunderbird shows messages in Archives on the new message list when I receive additional email, despite me having already viewed the copy of the same message in my Inbox.
2. Since 3.1, Thunderbird randomly stops responding. It's literally unusable for 15-20 seconds chunks, sometimes longer. Sometimes when I'm switching messages in my Inbox, sometimes when I'm writing an email to someone else.
If older software didn't tend to have more security holes than older software, I'd switch back to Thunderbird 2, which didn't have either of these problems.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Noticing from this thread that 3.1.2 was available, I applied it and restarted Thunderbird. Five minutes later, its accumulated CPU time since the restart is 00:00.03. That is 30 milliseconds. CPU usage, of course, is 00%. Peak working set a little over 113KB.
I've got three accounts in one profile, with all sent and received messages back to about 1997. Many, many thousands of them.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
I saw thunderbird 3 go crazy and keep redownloading and indexing the same messages from an imap server over and over and over until it turned a couple hundred MB of email into 34GB and completely filled the user's hard drive. The only thing that stopped it was to remove the program and delete the profile. No problems with thunderbird 2 or outlook on the same imap server. Thunderbird 3 while it has nice features has some serious bugs. Be warned!
Get a web developer
There is most definitely a performance problem and resource abuse issue with Thunderbird 3. The Portable version can't even run correctly at all from any but the fastest external Flash/SSD media, instead it must be run from an external HDD; otherwise the user interface takes extended sabbaticals for ten seconds at a time when even the mouse is ignored. It isn't simply the indexing feature, because explicitly disabling it in the configuration did nothing to relieve the above symptoms. I can't claim to know the exact nature of the cause, but running the Portable version from typical Flash media is a deal-breaker. It works well enough from even a slow 4200 RPM external HDD on both my desktop and laptop systems, but every piece of Flash media I tried made it unusable.
Thunderbird has other major usability bugs that aren't being addressed as well, things that would easily qualify for "papercut" status. An example: the "new" status assigned to retrieved messages disappears from all messages in accounts seemingly randomly at the drop of a hat: when opening and closing messages in a new window, deleting messages, compacting folders, or even just clicking from one account (folder) to another without doing anything else.
Basically I think all of Mozilla's energy is focused on Firefox, and Thunderbird isn't seeing much attention.
My ISP runs SpamAssassin on my incoming mail and moves spam to a junk mail folder. Some mails slips thru, so I train TB's spam filter on my junk mail folder. TB3 screams thru that folder compared to TB2. In TB2 you can easily follow the progress by rolling the mouse wheel, but in TB3 you'll have to follow it by pressing page down if you manage to catch up.
Then I told it to search all my emails for the string "gorilla". That saturated one of my eight cores (so about 10-12% CPU usage) for 1 minute and 20 seconds of CPU time. But what the hey - the other seven cores were still at my disposal.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
The problem is Mork. It's a stupid old database that Mozilla products are saddled with. When you have a big one, the whole damn thing needs to be loaded into memory to be parsed. Big folder? Bam, there goes a hundred megs of RAM. Swap if needed.
Replacing Mork with sqlite started a long time ago, has achieved limited success in some Mozilla products, and has been effectively abandoned in Thunderbird.
All this burns tremendously more computing resources than are really needed. Why does Mozilla hate the environment?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I have actually found the opposite, Thunderbird 2.x in OS X was dog slow and prone to random periods of non-responsiveness. Thunderbird 3.x on the other hand has been quite snappy.
sylpheed is better:
http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/
it uses MH for storage (similar to maildir - a requested tbird enhancement that has fallen on deaf ears for years)
I run thunderbird, and disabled the indexer a while back. But, calling 3.x buggy crap and not 2.x is a bit misleading. I had the distinctly icky experience of trying to find a strange IMAP crash back a few years ago.
I should have immediately given up, when my debug build failed to even run, poping on assertions all over the code base. The whole IMAP implementation in thunderbird is (was?) such a mess its lucky to be working. I remember finding bug after bug, and comment after comment about "hacks" made to avoid some nonsensical state because it was obvious the bug fixer was as clueless about the code execution as I was.
Instead of a clean class layout its was a total mess, and quite an example of what can easily happen in a C++ project with people who are totally enamored with trying every little design pattern.
caused me to downgrade to v.2. Window sizes and positions weren't saved, and the application windows were greyed out. Loved the new search function, however.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
At work, I have a Windows machine I need to use. I installed Thunderbird on it to read my personal email.
One day, Thunderbird offered me an update to Thunderbird 3. Sure, why not; I let it upgrade.
So, the next day I got an urgent email from the corporate IT department demanding to know why the corporate antivirus was reporting dozens of viruses on my work computer! I was not pleased.
My email server has a virus scanner (ClamAV of course), and when it detects a virus, it shunts the virus email message into a special folder. I rarely look at the folder or worry about it. Well, Thunderbird 3 changed the default behavior without asking me anything, and downloaded every message in every folder I have. Not just headers, message bodies as well. Thus, it downloaded a bunch of virus emails onto the hard disk of my corporate Windows desktop computer.
Long story short, IT ordered me to uninstall Thunderbird to make sure that this could never happen again. (IT recognizes that the viruses were never active on my system, but they officially have a zero-tolerance policy about viruses being present inside the corporate network at all.)
So I am no longer a Thunderbird user. I found another way to read my personal email while at work.
I was always happy with the old policy, of downloading message headers only, and grabbing the message bodies when I actually opened an email to read it. The new policy might make sense if I had a single machine that I always used to read email and I always wanted my email stuff to be as fast as possible (everything cached to the local hard disk). But I use IMAP and I read my mail from a half-dozen different computers, and the vast majority of my email on my server is old stuff I rarely look at. The new policy of downloading everything makes no sense for me, and I didn't see any way to globally change the setting; it looked to me like you need to change the setting on a folder-by-folder basis. (I could be wrong about that, but it doesn't matter because I had to abandon Thunderbird anyway.)
I don't think defaulting to downloading the entirety of every message on a server is a good idea. And it led to me being forced to abandon Thunderbird, so Thunderbird has at least one fewer user as a result.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
...but it was only because I didn't set a limit to my RSS feeds (had over 100,000), which took forever to index. But now with such index built, and a limit to my RSS feeds, thunderbird wastes nothing.
(I'm running the nightly build Shredder)
E's bleedin' demised!
At this point I could not care less what's up with TBird. TB3 was so badly mangled that after years of using TB, their 'latest greatest' convinced me to I give up and (ugh) switch to Apple Mail. It's the only Apple app I use routinely, which should say something about how much of an albatross TB3 has become.
I have multiple Google accounts + one Fastmail account, and I use IMAP and TB3.x with them all. The Fastmail + one of the Googles have about 10,000 emails each. I didn't notice any issues at all when I first fired TB up and it ran the sync. No issues thereafter either. I do find it odd that sync is turned on by default though. I'd have expected at least a "do you want to sync now" pop-up at some time. The only problem that I've had with it is a bug where, if using the TB "secure" password container, it asks me for about 100 passphrases for it on startup despite the fact that the first one I give it is the correct one. This only happens on one machine though so go figure. Nevertheless, if webmail clients all had skins as beautiful as GMail Redesigned I wouldn't use a local client at all.
The man who dies rich dies disgraced. -- Andrew Carnegie
Thunderbird 3 builds indexes of your mail boxes for every account. If you have huge mailboxes, the indexer is going to need some time to look through it all. You can turn off the indexing if you want through the advanced config editor (global search and indexing)[0].
"By default, Gloda indexing is enabled [93], also for migrating accounts. Note that indexing a large amount of e-mails takes considerable time and resources, especially when setting up a new account or migrating from an old profile! " [1]
[0] - http://kb.mozillazine.org/Mail_and_news_settings
[1] - http://kb.mozillazine.org/Thunderbird_3.0_-_New_Features_and_Changes
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
I have 12 email accounts on TB and using a mix of pop and imap, I see no differance or change at all, I'm on mac btw. think this only affects windows users.
TB3 was disaster. Folders would randomly disappear. Large mailboxes took forever to open, etc. Disabled indexing immediately but no joy. However, I get my mail on a network drive (so it would get backed up) and this seemed to be the cause of the problem. TB2 never had any problem. In the end, I abandoned pop mail and local folder and went to IMAP only. I never got an explanation about what had changed from TB2 to TB3 which made network storage untenable.
Thunderbird 2 had a clear, easy-to-use interface, with quick and simple searching and a nice layout. Thunderbird 3 doesn't appear to have a search function - although you can tell it to search, what it does is open up a new tab with all the emails that have anything in the search term in them, or sometimes nothing from the search terms which are presumably included just for fun, or because they looked lonely.
The best bit is when you try to find out if it's possible to disable tabs - you can't! The response from the developers is generally along the lines of "ZOMG LOLWUT TABS ARE MORE AWESOMER Y U WANT RID OF EM??!!11?!!"
Thunderbird 3 hangs up regularly on my Macbook Pro (stays open, but does not respond to keyboard/mouse interaction). I rarely reboot my computer, and usually I have to kill the process 5 or 6 times per day to get my emails. One thing I've noticed is that if I do not quit Thunderbird before closing the lid of the notebook, when I open it is no longer responding. I do not care much about all the new bells and whistles, but need a reliable mail program that uses some sort of standard storage format, and allows me to have multiple accounts and a large number of emails locally. A couple of years ago I moved from Apple Mail to Thunderbird because I could not stand the poor user interface of Mail. But now Thunderbird sucks as well... previous versions were so much stable and responsive..
So the question is, are they still using Mork concurrently? Why are MSF files being updated?
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Clicking on that link and reading the heading "Gloda is an index, not a data store" would suggest yes.
This article hits the nail on the head. I was almost ready to give up on T-Bird and resort to using Microcrap. Yes T-bird is that bad when you need to read a dozen IMAP accounts some of which are on gmail.
The solutions posed make sense. What I'd like to know is more about the tool used to diagnose this: PerfProtector. There are only passing mentions of it as open source/ freeware but google reveals no known source for download.
Inquiring minds want to know!!!!
I used tbird for over a year, and when I was laid off, and had to send out email that looked nice, and needed a good online calendar, I found that tbird didn't work for me. it wasn't performance, it was features; for 40 bucks, you can get a copy of office 2003 off of ebay, and outlook has a lot more formatting features then tbird not to mention the calendar; the calendar on tbird basically sucks bigtime etc YMMV; I just don't get why you would use tbird if you have the 40 bucks; I'm sure there are a lot people here who prefer tbird to outlook, but for me it was an inferior program.
.sqlite files are used for all the user profile-related stuff, including search index files.
Unfortunately Mork is still used in the message stores themselves - the .msf files are Mork DB files (currently v1.4) used to index individual message folders. Users who keep thousands of messages in one folder (especially the Inbox) will be performance impacted more than users who file stuff away into separate folders.
I don't understand this obsession with speed in browsers and email clients. I've never felt either Firefox or Thunderbird has been slow to load or slow to perform an action. I'm far more worried about the user interface since it doesn't matter how fast a piece of software is if it's a nightmare to use and sadly Mozilla seem to have copied the Thunderbird 3 UI from a ten year old copy of Lotus Notes. I don't think you could find a worse source of UI inspiration than Lotus Notes and the result is that Thunderbird 3 is now very unpleasant to use. The search has also been changed so instead of a concise list of results it presents you with a complete mess. I'd be more likely the find my email if I vomited on screen.
I now pretty much take it as a given that Mozilla are going to make Firefox and Thunderbird worse with each new release, but this is were they really come into their own. Unlike IE, Chrome and to a large extent Opera, Mozilla's products are completely customisable to the user's preference. There's yet to be anything they've fucked up that can't be undone in fairly easily, and while it's irritating to constantly have to found how to fix things Mozilla have broken it does ultimately lead to a very pleasing user experience. People are always asking "is Mozilla relevant anyone?" and I'd have to say the customisability of their software makes them very relevant. When you use software from Microsoft or Google you use it the way they tell you to but when you use software from Mozilla you can configure it to your preferences and use it the way you want.
It is 2010 and you read Slashdot. If you haven't figured out by now that Open Source is a far superior development model to proprietary then you may as well give up trying to understand this complicated software stuff.
It's 2010 and YOU read Slashdot. If you haven't figured out how fucking stupid and shortsighted you are, go back into mommy's basement and let her suck your man titties.
I really wanted to keep using Thunderbird and help solve all its problems like the annoying lowercase buttons and intractable indexing feature. I really even tried to tolerate installing 26 extensions to fix all that I and others thought was wrong with Thunderbird, but I have to sadly admit that I gave up and use Squirrelmail exclusively now.
Sigh.
Kriston
A person writing your kind of message should be touting Facebook, not webmail in the 21st Century and that everything else is draconian. This is somewhat disappointing.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
.
Mainly because I want to be able to send my emails in ONE font type, in ONE font size, with NO fucking autoformatting and NO fucking automatically configuring headings and subheadings and font types and sizes.
.
If I want to write documents, I'll write them, if I want to send emails, I'll write and send them.
.
I do not however, want to be using my emailer as a substitute for a word processing package, with NO fucking way to switch this idiotic shit off..
.
The people in Mozilla are all dickheads.
.
Voting up, Voting down - If I really gave a fuck about your approval or not, I'd come and ask you.
The specification of IMAP SEARCH contains a lot of "MAY" statements (esp. regarding charsets), so it may be that the TB implementors have decided that they want a search which actually does the exact same thing regardless of what IMAP server you're using. There's also the very real possibility that various IMAP servers don't actually implement what's specified -- IMAP is notorious for this, even regarding such basic things as folder structure.
Seriously: http://www.claws-mail.org/
I've been using it for around two years now and am continually amazed at how little press it's gotten compared to Thunderbird. It does everything I've ever wanted Thunderbird to do (and more), and it's much, much faster.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
Apologies in advance for jumping on this bandwagon but I too am not happy with Thunderbird 3. My two favourite shortcut keys (G for grouping and \ for compressing groups no longer work). I guess I am not a huge fan of the tabbed mail concept either. I always seem to be left with mails hanging open in tabs.
Mind you in a fit of disgruntlement I had a go at using gmail as a mail client and I am happy to report that even with its current troubles Thunderbird is way better. If you get more than a handful of emails per day the usability of gmail stinks and gmail is probably the best of the web email clients.
I have switched back to SeaMonkey's mail client on my main PC, Fujitsu Lifebook P5020 with 1Ghz Penitum M, 1 GB RAM, Linux Mint 7, and finding it "quick enough". I still fire TB 2 in parallel once in a while, but have not liked the interface diffs from Netscape/Mozilla/SeaMonkey for years (10 years of email in that progression).
I have another notebook/netbook with Xubuntu 9.10 with a few months of email (started from scratch, did not want to 'sync' with my email history), running TB 3 (I think - standard on 'buntu 9.10?), and have seen some performance impacts at times it seems. Interface is more cluttered than ever, and sucks up the 768 vertical pixels with "fluff" as far as I am concerned. Evolution is worse in that regard, SM tolerable. They are all enough to make me look seriously at Mutt or some other text-based client...
RO
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And you apparently don't know the difference between text and HTML.
Quad core. Didn't notice anything different.
Well, I use TB3 daily at work and have no problems with it there (WinXP SP3, with a number of extensions including Lightening). However, I also run it at home (again with a number of extensions) where my folders are significantly larger - my personal e-mail presently has ~5k email in it and that's just the last couple months; I have probably several GB of text email (so each message is relatively small) at home, where TB3 runs under Gentoo Linux (x86). For the most part, it's not a problem at home; until I try to move 1k of messages around (e.g. moving from one folder to another manually, not via a filter), then TB3 locks up for a while and after several attempts finally moves the messages - but you kind of have to expect that when moving 1k of messages around.
My only real qualm with TB is that I can't do very complex filters - namely a A+B do C, A+D do E; for example: if message from list A and has word X then move to place Y and mark as read; if message from list A and does not have word X then just move to place Y. Yeah, I could probably simulate this by putting filters on every single folder (e.g. master filter just "if message from list A then move to place Y", then on place Y put another filter of "if message has word X mark as read"), but that's pretty cumbersome when it could be easily resolved in the master filter list when checking an e-mail account.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
I only have 2 POP accounts less than 20,000 emails total in all of my folders..