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