Today, I decided to give up on Thunderbird. It happened this morning when I opened my Inbox and found I couldn't open any email delivered before 2:00 yesterday.
This follows on the heels earlier this year of losing all of my old email going back to 2004. I decided I could live with that, but today when I ran into yet another inbox corruption, I felt it was time to wave the white flag. For now, I will use Google Reader as my RSS reader and read my email in the Comcast web interface.
I don't do this lightly because I've always been fond of Thunderbird and what it can do and the concept of a free email client, but a mail client that constantly loses my email, well, I simply can't live with that and shouldn't have to. I thought perhaps I had a freak machine, but this article from a year ago by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols shows that my problems are far from isolated. And after trying some of the solutions such as deleting all the msf files or compacting my inbox, I found it actually only made my problems worse.
Look, I'm comfortable with Thunderbird. I like its Spam filter. I have my own email filters and folders set up. This is not an easy decision, but sometimes it's better to cut your losses. Today is that day. Farewell Thunderbird.
I don't know why all e-mail programs have to use a proprietary mail database format... Why don't they store the mail as plain files on the hard drive? (I know, I know, cluster bloat), but really, they need to find something better.
Posted by: RedTuttle | January 23, 2008 at 06:57 PM
After using it now for over 5 years, I too have given up on it. I got a new computer recently, and transferring my profile doesn't seem to work no matter what I try. I've read every article I could find on the web, and most of them are ancient. Farewell!
Posted by: D.Anderson | November 04, 2008 at 09:18 AM