Nobrainer’s Think Tank

Thunderbird got the nod from me after junk mail was piling up in Outlook in a big way. It had some nice features — particularly better spam blocking — and the pleasant ability to adds bells and whistles. Now, after a little less than a year, I’m about to pull the plug.

T-Bird worked well enough for day-to-day email exchanges. I was able to send and receive without too much hassle. The amount of spam landing in my inbox also decreased dramatically as was promised.

On the other hand, there were a number of things that I never much cared for in T-Bird.

• Having previously used — and disliked — the mail application included with Netscape, I never cared much for the layout of Thunderbird, which is virtually identical.
• Along similar lines, things that I thought should be basic weren’t included: ease of BCC, sending emails without subjects, etc. They must be added by installing extensions.
• The formatting in the subject line of “FW:” or “RE:” bugs me, too. In an email string with just about anyone not using Mozilla, the subject becomes “[Re: RE: [Re: RE: [Re: Re: [FW: Subject]]]], or some stupid shit.
• Other small, but acceptable things exist as well.
• The address book isn’t that great. My primary gripe is that when I pull up the address book, find the name I’m searching for, and have the information displayed in a viewing pane, it is not possible to directly copy information from the viewing pane. WTF! How few applications are there today that let you see information without letting you copy it?
• The calendar must be added in as an extension. That thing is a whopping piece of colossal shit. I’ll leave it at that.

Given the depth of shittiness of the calendar, I actually opened up Outlook for the first time since January 4th (if the date of the last saved email is correct.) Being a bit bored, I decided to download the recent updates and run it for a few days. So far so good; no spam has slipped through, unlike Thunderbird, over the same time period. Since spam was the primary reason for my switch, a fix to that problem neatly opens the door for my return. Let’s see how long this lasts.