Well, So Much for Thunderbird
Published at 07:34 on 9 April 2014
I’ve been using Mozilla’s Thunderbird client to read my e-mail since last fall, when Apple Mail’s antics finally got to the point that the camel’s back broke. (The final straw was when message filtering mysteriously stopped working for my work computer. The amount of messages I receive at work make it absolutely intolerable for filtering to not work; it’s a must if important messages that impact my ability to do my work well are to get noticed instead of buried amongst massive numbers of unimportant messages.)
Yesterday morning I notice that Thunderbird is definitely eating messages on one of my inboxes. They simply don’t show up. Sometimes, they show up but a week or more late, in one big batch. There’s no clear reason why. So far the only explanation I’ve found is to delete “bad” messages that “confuse” Thunderbird, and to be sure to “compact my folders” regularly.
Well, sorry. Neither should be my responsibility. None of those “bad” messages confuse Apple Mail or the Squirrel Mail software I use to read that mailbox over the web. Moreover, it is not my responsibility to babysit a program which is incapable of managing its own databases by manually “compacting” files. I’m busy enough as it is without having to add extra busywork to the picture, busywork that makes me miss important communications and thus mismanage my time if I don’t do it.
So the search for a mail client that does not abjectly suck resumes.