Thunderbird
From Grokdoc
Mozilla Thunderbird
Current Version: 1.0 Homepage: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/
Features:
Intelligent Spam Features Two or three columned interface Excellent Security Features Message Grouping RSS Integration Saved Search Folders Quick Search Privacy Controls
My 53 year old father uses Thunderbird. He finds it to be, in general, intuitive and easy enough, but the bugs frustrate him a great deal. The worst one has to do with threads of email. He loves grouping his discussions together (he's on a couple of high-volume mailing lists) but finds that selecting a thread and hitting delete only deletes the top message in the the thread. The little things like this, and some of the menu organization things are the only parts he doesn't like.
A possible solution: I have message filters that put each mailing list in it's own folder, then I have 2 more filters for each mailing list, one that moves the messages that are more than 10-15 days old to an "old" folder inside tho one containing the list (marking them as read), and another, that deletes the messages that are more than a month old. Of course, the time limits can be changed and the first filter is optional.
The solution: When I want to erase the whole thread I just click on the little flag at the left of the first message of the thread that you want to delete. That marks all the messages under that thread. Pressing delete you get that thread erased.
I use to migrate people from Outlook talking about SPAM filters in Thunderbird. They work great.
Same goes for my parents (although they don't use threaded email features that much, so they probably didn't notice the bugs). They've used mail clients ranging from outlook express, opera (M2) to thunderbird. I did all the installations for them and converted the mail (which is _really_ a pain when considering switching clients, or at least it was at that time with opera->thunderbird). General user experience is good, they consider thunderbird an easier to use client than the previous they had (not making this up, they said it). Considering their past in changing clients (reasons: clumsy clients/ security - i gave the last reason a small push), they're going to stick with this one i think.
Those are good ideas on the subrules regarding message age. Marking the thread for deletion may also be a viable option; I'll explore it.
What about preferences working globally? The same 53-year-old above had an issue I thought he was imagining where he could mark a message as Junk in his inbox and have it move out, but marking a message as Junk in a list folder would not cause this move. While not a deal breaker, this was inconvenient and confusing. It turned out that I needed to set the preference for this junk mail move manually for both "accounts." (One was local mail, and the other was mail associated plainly with the email account.)
I guess the root thing here is behavior that, while not necessarily wrong, is not intuitive for normal users.
That's a good one.
I found tricky the fact that it is not so simple to use several SMTP servers. First you have to create the account, then create the server, then go to Options, advanced...
BTW, I'm the one who post about the migration before, and I install it to people over 60 years old. They love it.
I myself am a newby to gpg/pgp. I need to use them in my communications with some people (and I think this need will increase). I used it with some old version of thunderbird (on red hat 9), with the mozilla enigmail plugin. I switched version, and it didn't work ever since. I recently tried to use the package mozilla-thunderbird-enigmail for debian sarge, but it also does not work properly for me. I heard that gpg can be managed in dependently from the console, but was not able to do so. Ideally, my parents (non-teachies) should be able to use gpg themselves... For the rest, thunderbird was my first email client after years of webmail, and I loved it. I switched because of the spam filters, which were fairly easy to configure. For people who switch to email clients from webmail, I also think that greater care should be placed on the option "leave mail on server". It can be fairly destroying, if you don't expect it and are just "checking new programs"...
Agree strongly on the "leave mail on server!" Nothing says "this program's crap" like having someone test it and lose a day's worth of email in their other, existing program.
If it hasn't been changed already, we need a change to leaving mail on the server as a default. It certainly isn't going to hurt the ISPs.
