Following major releases of Thunderbird there are always glowing reviews by various outfits from ezines to blogs to online editions of paper magazines. Sometimes I read these and wonder whether the authors of these reviews have actually used the software for more than the time required to take screenshots. Usually Thunderbird is painted as the best thing since sliced cheese.

To round out my basis for complaining, I guess, it helps to know the email/news path that brought me to Thunderbird. In college, I used unix command line apps like tin and pine. Then NS 3.0, 4.0, 4.5, Outlook Express 5, 6, Thunderbird 0.1-0.5 with a sprinking of MS Outlook 2003 recently.

I've used Thunderbird since 0.1 so I know its shortcomings and virtues well. Many of the virtues are well-known, most of the shortcomings are not, because they usually reveal themselves after prolonged use. The important thing to know is that Thunderbird 0.5 is not a new program, but a continuation of the Mozilla Mail.

So If you want to hear about how great Thunderbird is, go elsewhere, this is, after all, a critical look.

Let's start with the handling of junk. While Thunderbird is ages above OE6, it is by no means the king of the hill. I've got a large pile of email and it routinely misses obvious junk (like stuff that starts with ADV: or the MyDoom virus that I've marked as junk about a million times). Still, it ain't bad: it probably identifies 6 out of 10 (~60% for those keeping score) junk mails properly. And it hasn't labeled a real email as spam in ages. Score for Thunderbird. On the other hand, amazingly, Microsoft Outlook 2003 hasn't had any misses, period! I have no idea what kind of technique they are using, but you can't argue with the results. To be fair, I've used MS Outlook 2003 for a much shorter period of time. Will see how it does when the next virus goes on the loose.

Message Filters is probably the most maddening part of the program. I am not talking about email filters - those work fine. I am talking about newsgroup filters. Theoretically, the app allows you to set up a filter for the entire server. To that end, highlight a news server in the Folders tree and then select Tools/Message Filters. Setup up your filter and click your way out of the dialog. Now restart Thunderbird, highlight the news server again, go see your filtersoops, they are gone. That's right, not there, as in dead. Not resting, cause I know a resting filter when I see one. Dead. Deceased. Not even stunned. Actually passed on. See this for the rest. So your alternative is to setup a message filter for every solitary newsgroup that you frequent. If you frequent (or need it for your work) more than a few or subscribe/unsubscribe to new ones regularly, it becomes a major irritation.

By now you can see that I am a serious newsgroup user. It is a fantastic tool that's more helpful than anything else on the web. Which brings me to the newsgroup abbreviations. By default, Thunderbird displays newsgroups in an abbreviated manner. In other words, microsoft.public.windowsxp.general will be shown as m.p.w.g. As you can well imagine this is about as useful as the 3rd leg. So right from the start you have an unusable situation. The abbreviating, however, can be easily resolved by a quick hack, which makes the newsgroups names look expanded as in the image below.

There are several things going on in the image, which will get to later, but now we've brought the newsgroup name handling to a more or less usable state (via the hack above). However, let's take a quiz: can you make out which newsgroups I subscribe to? Ok, so it is microsoft.pu something ends with harp. I am subscribed to Microsoft Harp??? No, can't be. What about microsoft.puneral? Funeral?? Next contestant, spin the wheel. So, being the enterprizing young man, I went about trying to solve this user-interface gaffe. I right-click on the name of the newsgroup and voila, an option to rename the folder pops (as in the image below). Imagine my relief, I'll be able to assign an short alias to the newsgroups, like WinXp for microsoft.public.windowsxp.general. Fantastic. So, I type in 'WinXp' and press the OK button. But, wait, nothing happens. Yep, folks, the command does absolutely nothing. Try it yourself.

Another thing that I thought was going to happen quickly is the ability to add functionality to the toolbar (given the nature of its customizable toolbar). For instance, it would be useful to have a toggle between text view and the HTML view for my email messages. Right now, you have to dig the option out of the menus. So this is a major impediment to the usefulness of the program, particularly for users who like to tinker.

The startup time, hopefully, will improve at some point. Comparing Thunderbird with Outlook Express 6 is not favorable to the former at all. Regardless, Thunderbird is fast enough for me on new hardware.

Finally, one thing that kind of dogs Thunderbird in particular and OSS software in general (FireFox and some few others excluded) is lack of the proverbial killer feature. Part of it is Thunderbird's slow development pace, at least compared to FireFox. For instance, Thunderbird 0.5 is pretty much the same as Thunderbird 0.1 + the new theme + some improvements. Nevertheless, despite the problems, I still consider to be an app with some great potential and continue to use it.

Some ideas for killer features:

• Instead of having its own address book, integrate with the system address, like the KAddressBook in KDE or the Address Book (or Outlook 2003 and soon to be WinFS) in Windows
• Extending the search metaphore for newsgroups inside Thunderbird to searching Google news groups