Nobrainer’s Think Tank

Allow me to follow up on my initial review of Thunderbird 3.

The new Thunderbird is growing on me. I’m getting used to the new position of buttons at about the same rate I adjust to the change in year. By April, or July if it’s a bad year, I should have it all figured out.

Since my last review, I installed Expression Search, which has made my email searching experience much more pleasant; in fact I like using this form of search far more than both the default Thunderbird and Google Desktop email searches. It appears that my quest for email search nirvana continues.

One bonus of the new Thunderbird is the ability to view email conversations. Sort of. From what I’ve observed, you can see all the participants and their initial remarks, but you can’t view the entire thing. Moreover, the format of the “conversation” in the reader pane is so devoid of contrast that I find it difficult, at least initially, to easily discern who is saying what to whom.

The most important improvement is the ability to open emails in tabs rather than in new windows. I like it for the same reason I liked the inclusion of tabs in the web browser. However, now that Thunderbird has tabs, I feel like there needs to be the option to incorporate Thunderbird directly into Firefox.

onsider this scenario I regularly encounter. In the morning, I awake to find dozens of new messages in my inbox. I triage them by opening the important or interesting ones in tabs. Once I make it through all the new messages, I attack the tabs. Frequently, the message in a tab is a Google News Alert, which, for the unfamiliar, includes possibly dozens of links of which there are a few worth clicking on.

As it happens now, those links open in new tabs in Firefox meaning I have to switch back and forth between the Firefox and Thunderbird windows. I would rather have those tabs open next to the email message I’m reading. There is a clunky extension for Thunderbird called ThunderBrowse, that accomplishes the task of opening web pages in Thunderbird. But it does not do so well. So rather than incorporating the browser into the email client, I think it needs to move in the other direction. It also needs to be more incorporated than the email/browser clients in SeaMonkey, where they’re basically separate programs where one can be used to open the other.

I would like to see the ability to create a dedicated Thunderbird tab, maybe that can be assigned a specific tab position, within Firefox. Then, email messages can be opened in tabs within FF and moved, sorted, maybe even bookmarked, in the same way that web pages are.

This really runs counter to the light, agile, browser concept. I accept that, which is why it should be an optional add on. But considering that 99.9% of the time I have Thunderbird and Firefox open anyway, I doubt there will be much of a change in system performance.