Its the little things
I’ve been forced to start using Thunderbird for my Office email as there is some bizarre incompatibility with SmarterMail and Mail.app. The short of this is I’ve had to start using an app I never wanted to.
I like Mail.app, and its the silly little quirks of Thunderbird which really piss me off.
Deleting an email
I have my most recent emails at the top, its a fairly regular convention I think. When I delete an email in Mail.app the selection bar moves upwards to the next most recent email. If I’ve deleted the top one, the new top one is selected. In contrast Thunderbird moves the selection bar downwards, usually to my most recently read and accepted email.
I read my new emails from bottom to top, it helps me stay on top of how a conversation is unfolding. Now like many people I get spam, some of it is voluntary like mailing lists and some is garden variety useless. So I often want to delete a couple of emails in quick succession. Say I had to delete 3 spam emails from my mailbox. I’ve got loads that I want to keep and just say 5 new emails. So I read the first one, and I want to keep that around. Fine I press up and look at the next one, its spam so I press delete.
In Mail.app I am now looking at the next spam email, so I can press delete again and its gone, same with the next. Thunderbird on the other hand shows me the email I’ve already read. So I’ve got to press up again then delete, and repeat for the next spam message.
This is really annoying.
Sending an Email
Mail.app just stays out of my way, takes my message and sends it on. Thunderbird under default settings will almost always prompt you every single time if you want it in
- Plain Text Only
- HTML Only
- Plain Text and HTML
now I honestly could care less how its sent so long as the person at the other end has a hope in hell of actually being able to read it.
Addressbook
This is more of a cheap gripe and I know its being worked on for the next version of Thunderbird but could they not even have added an importer when you setup Thunderbird like Firefox wants to steal your IE bookmarks and history all the time. I mean there is a nice fairly well documented AddressBook framework in Mac OS, I know, I’ve used it a couple times.
I’ll stop here, I really need to get back to work but I feel better for getting that out of my system.