Thunderbird - 2.0.0.18

Eudora is still MUCH better! -
I agree 100%.

I add to puffo25's list

1, fastest email search and text browsing available!
2. very stable
3. attactive graphic and layout
4. easy to use and customize
5. very user friendly

6. Best Fetch ever: skip messages with attach you don't want
but still have the first lines available to read

I have Leopard but I still use Eudora because of that

Catbel

If you double-click an attachment to launch it with an application, this version of Thunderbird continues to have the <b>BUG</b> that the file is saved to the desktop. It ignores the preference for 'save attachments to ...' in this case (and in fact it's not clear to me what effect that preference setting has in any case...)

This is so annoying that I've had to change how I handle email attachments. They're all set to "save to file", and I leave Thunderbird, go to my saved attachment directory, and launch them manually from there. This is less annoying than having my desktop contaminated with tons of attachments.

This has been reported as a bug, but the Thunderbird team shows no signs of fixing it. The expected behavior would be for Thunderbird to save the attachment in the directory specified by the preference setting for "attachments -> save all attachments to this folder", and then to launch the application.

Mail.app hasn't scaled up to hold the volume of messages I process and archive. Thunderbird does handle large mailboxes, although searching in particular is painfully slow, and Thunderbird stores all messages/mailbox in a single file (versus in a directory with separate files, as does Mail.app.) This makes Thunderbird mailboxes not particularly useful/helpful for Spotlight searching (and increases the pain associated with Thunderbird's own search). Additionally, Thunderbird doesn't support user-level multitasking very well. There's no easy way (is there a way at all?) to have a search going in one window, and still read mail in another window while that search is grinding on.

Additionally, the main reason I switched to Thunderbird is that I needed a mailer to handle PKI certificates and encrypted email. Thunderbird is acceptable at this, although it decided arbitrarily a couple of months ago that my own cert was no good, and I ended up having to get another cert to replace it.

Boy, do I ever miss Eudora! With all its warts, in-application searching was fast, it handled large mailboxes really well, it had more filter options than either Thunderbird or Mail.app (although the filter user interface left something to be desired...) The bogosity currently labeled "Eudora" is no substitute...

dave

(Apples to 2.0.0.x, including 2.0.0.9)

Although this has been reported as a bug many times, Thunderbird still craps up my desktop with attachments whenever I double-click the attachment to launch it. It does this despite the Preferences setting for attachments. This is truly user-hostile appalling behavior, and is sufficiently damaging to my personal workflow that I'm considering abandoning this mail client in favor of something better behaved (I'll probably try Leopard Mail.app).

It does a good job with well-formed encryption certificates, but won't let you accept a cert whose authority T-bird hasn't either pre-loaded or whose root certificate you have already found and accepted. (Outlook will let you override this default behavior.) Filter behavior is OK, not as flexible as Eudora but a bit easier to use than Tiger Mail.app. It scales to large mailboxes pretty well, but the necessary plug-in for duplicate messages doesn't work in the current version. (T-Bird, like Eudora, sometimes gets confuses and re-downloads your mailbox.) I'm using it with both POP and IMAP, and it's doing OK with both kinds of mail servers. The ability to specify mail server settings (both incoming and outgoing) is a bit klugy but has provided me with all the bells-and-whistles I need for my 4 different mail servers.

I sure miss Eudora, though (and I don't mean the 'make Thunderbird look like Eudora' skin that came out recently).

I feel it is deserving of 5 Stars. It does its job well and is a great free application that has devealoped into a heavy hitter.

I tried out Thunderbird around the time it first came out and it wasn't bad. There were some issues with multiple email accounts that kept me from using it. Now that's fixed. I think the main thing that keeps me away from it now is that it has poor support for .Mac. No matter what settings I change, it keeps throwing it's own Trash folder into my account. It's quite annoying. Address Book importing would be much appreciated too.

All in all I think that it is the second best email client on the Mac just after Apple Mail. It's become quite mature and the UI looks great now. It's much more intuitive and less bloated than Entourage which is possibly the second most popular. You can also install the Mozilla Sunbird calendar app into Thunderbird as an extension which is called Lightning. You can find it at:

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/

I think Thunderbird and Lightning are great options for anyone who may be currently using Entourage and don't absolutely need the Exchange support, or really anyone wanting an alternative to iCal and Mail. It brings the convenience of having your emails and calendars together.