Second take on Mozilla Thunderbird

Okay, I’ve had a little more time for evaluation, plus Stephanie decided to follow my lead and install it on her desktop PC, too.  Some observations:

• T’bird clearly isn’t quite as slick and polished as Firefox.  I’ve noticed a few oddities, with no explanation as to why the given feature or whatever doesn’t work as it ought to.  Also, nowhere near as many add-ons to choose from.
• One such area is in importing from Outlook.  There’s no reason given as to why T’bird fails to import Outlook’s settings, it just fails.  I don’t consider this a show-stopper though, as it’s not that big a deal to enter my various email account settings, but more info as to why the import failed would be appreciated.
• A trick for making sure you get all of your Outlook emails and folders imported: In Outlook, open every single PST file you have, including the archives.  Then close Outlook.  Start T’bird and run the import mail function.  If you have something on the order of 30k emails over 10 years, the process is gonna take a while.  Also, if you have tons and tons of folders as Stephanie had, it may seem as if there’s no progress for a long time at first — be patient, because it takes the import function a while to generate all the folders and mail files before it even begins to populate them with your imported emails.  We’re talking like half an hour, 45 min in all.
• There’s something hinky about the delete message function.  I wish I could describe it precisely, but on initial installation it just didn’t seem to work quite right.  Message navigation also seems strange, although it could be in part because I always prefer to use a separate message window, not a viewing pane in the main program.
• A word of caution:  When installing add-ons and themes, do them only one at a time.  Last night, Stephanie tried to install a whole bunch and on restart, her configuration was FUBAR’d.  Had to uninstall and start over.
• For those who want portability, there are some schemes and methods, but the first thing is to know how to manage Thunderbird profiles.  On Windows, the default location for the profile — which contains not only all your custom settings, add-ons, and themes, but also your email — is C:\Documents and Settings\(your user name)\Application Data\Thunderbird.  That said, you can only see that directory if you have "See Hidden Folders and Files" turned on in Windows Explorer.  Not sure what the deal is for Mac or Linux, where the files are stored.  But anyway, that whole profile can be copied elsewhere (and is a very good candidate for regular backing up).  You can also create additional profiles or manage existing ones with the command Run>thunderbird -profilemanager
• The idea is you move the profile where you want (copying is better, in case of problems), then use the profilemanager utility to point to the new location.  This is also how you can set up identical profiles on multiple machines (such as on a desktop and laptop).

Well, that’s all for now.  I’ll post on this topic again later if I’ve anything else to add.