I've known for a while now that Thunderbird's offline support was somewhat flakey. Firstly, you have to specifically tell Thunderbird to go offline and to synchronise with the server. In Mail.app, there's a simple preference to keep copies of downloaded mail, and when you disconnect it's all there for you. So one morning, knowing I'd be on the road without a net connection but still needing my mail archive for reference, I did the "Download/Sync now" dance and then toggled the "Work offline" menu option. Firing up the laptop on the train I was just a little irritated (irritated in the sense of "screaming fits of rage") to see the following message:
The body of this message has not been downloaded from the server for reading offline. To read this message, you must reconnect to the network, choose Offline from the File menu and then select Work Online.In the future, you can select which messages or folders to read offline. To do this, choose Offline from the file menu and then select Synchronize. You can adjust the Disk Space preference to prevent the downloading of large messages.
What's that all about?! It's a killer bug, and renders Thunderbird almost useless in any environment with intermittent network access. I'm not sure if this is a Mac-specific problem, or a problem with syncing my admittedly substantial mailbox - but either way, there should at least be some warning if syncing is not possible. Never mind the fact that selecting "synchronize" and then "work offline" seems decidedly old-school: can't Thunderbird check to see if the network is there and then do the right thing if it isn't?
Next up in my list of problems with Thunderbird: poor handling of connectivity issues. I swap networks a lot (for example when moving from work to home, or switching from wireless to wired). Thunderbird seems to hate this, and will hang and eventually display a "connection refused" error - or even worse, misbehave so much whenever I try to view some folders that the only solution is to restart it.
The columns in the message list pane don't appear to be configurable: there's no way to get rid of the 'junk status' column, and more than once I've accidentally marked emails as junk, only to find suddenly all incoming mail is being junked too. This column is dangerous.
On the subject of junk mail, I've found Thunderbird's junk mail detection to be a little suspicious: too many false positives in comparison to Mail.app, so I've now turned it off.
Message filters: it would be nice to be able to duplicate and then edit filters, particularly the complex ones, rather than having to recreate them from scratch each time.
Threading: it's nice to have decent threading of emails, but if a reply to an old thread crops up, it usually takes serious scrolling to find it, as I have my mailbox sorted by date. Why can't the entire thread be made visible with emails from today? I think Thunderbird tries to open the message list pane at the right place, but it rarely seems to work, so sorting threads in date order by "most recent post to thread" seems like a better idea.
Address Book synchronisation: I'll be happy if/when this works for me (Torsten reports it works, but I wasn't able to duplicate his experiences). Right now I'm using Plaxo, which does the job and has some fringe benefits like auto-updating when others change their details. It's just a shame it requires a conscious decision to synchronise - it would be nice if I could tell Address Book and Thunderbird to do a Plaxo sync once a day.
It's a shame that mail messages do not show up in Spotlight searches, but the search functionality in Thunderbird is pretty good so I can cope with that.
Ok, that's enough complaining, what about the good things? Well, I'm happy that I now have a mail setup that I can take with me to Linux or Windows. Thunderbird doesn't seem to suffer the random hangs when downloading emails that I was getting with Mail.app. I really like how Thunderbird highlights folders with new unread mails in blue, and folders with old unread emails in bold.
It's funny that in 2006 I'm not significantly happier with my mail handling than I was in 1996. Right now I'm actively considering running a local mail server, as a way of working around Thunderbird's broken offline support. But this totally removes the benefits of being able to work from any machine (I frequently end up using Pine on a remote server when I'm on the road, for example).
I wrote most of the above over the last 2-3 months, but then today for the second time in a month, Thunderbird stopped working. Every time it starts up, it just hangs, occasionally saying "Checking mail server capabilities". This was really the last straw, and so (with hideous timing) I'm having to switch back to Mail.app. This means downloading 3gb of mail from the server, rewriting 200+ mail filtering rules, and checking all the accounts are there. It's a nightmare, particularly as I'm supposed to catch a train in a couple of hours. Thanks, Thunderbird.
Posted by savs at October 6, 2006 11:31 AMWhy not just do something like offline-imap? It works pretty well, it means that you can use multiple clients on both the server and any clients, and you don't have to run a mail server
Posted by: Thom at October 6, 2006 12:26 PMAbout the message filters : why not using maildrop or sieve, having this functionality on server side?
You will save time rewriting the filter rules everytime you need to install a new email client; it's also pretty useful when you use webmail interfaces.