Mozilla Messaging Starts up Operations [LWN.net]

Mozilla Messaging Starts up Operations

Posted Feb 20, 2008 11:53 UTC (Wed) by mgh (subscriber, #5696)
Parent article: Mozilla Messaging Starts up Operations

What concerns me is that the thrust of the approach to the new Thunderbird is more features...
how about getting the basics right first?

- some attachements are corrupted, some on receipt some on sending
- attachments are downloaded up to 3 times when using imap 
- even if mail is available locally the remote server is always preferred

the last two (amoung others) make thunderbird almost unusable with IMAP and a mobile device.

Don't get me wrong I use TB everyday for 10 hours a day and it does some things very well.

But I'd trade a lot of features for better stability.  My reccomendation to the TB team would
be improve quality, reduce code size, make TB portable for mobile devices and modularise it so
features can be added as modules for more capable devices.  Anyway dreams are free :-)

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Mozilla Messaging Starts up Operations

Posted Feb 20, 2008 20:00 UTC (Wed) by cpm (subscriber, #3554) [Link]

- some attachements are corrupted, some on receipt some on sending
- attachments are downloaded up to 3 times when using imap 


Umm, interesting.

gotta roll out here @work of about a hundred tbirds, running
on OSX,Win and Linux. I've NEVER seen this in the 3+ years
that we've been a tbird only shop. 

What I have seen, is some of my 'power users' deciding to move
some stuff out of their multi-gig inboxes into subfolders, and
the so-called move ends up creating multiple copies of the emails.

I've never been able to replicate this myself. I've tried.

Stability and reliability

Posted Feb 20, 2008 21:54 UTC (Wed) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]

I agree completely. Stability really is critical - Thunderbird has to manipulate the user's
own data, but it sometimes is just not reliable, which causes real problem for both new users
and power users. See http://lwn.net/Articles/266938/ for comments on this.

Ease of use etc matter as well, but without reliability adoption of Thunderbird will always be
limited.