Thunderbird Email Program
I have been using The Bat Email client for three or four years now. I’ve been really happy with it but I really like Firefox and the open source community of Mozilla so I decided to check out Mozilla’s Thunderbird last night.
There wasn’t much of a learning curve. I immediately set up all of my accounts and as email arrived I created new folders and message filters to organize incoming messages. I found the spam filter to be fairly intuitive as I began marking the spam messages. I was able to set up my dynamic signature for outgoing emails and I installed quite a few extensions with no problems at all.
There are some issues though. The first one is both Firefox and Thunderbird are resource hogs. Firefox sits at 43 MB and Thunderbird is at 24 MB while SlimBrowser uses only 12 MB and The Bat uses only 5 MB. That bothers me as I like to run quite a few programs simultaneously and even though I have a gig of RAM Firefox and Thunderbird slow me down.
The other issue I have is I cannot find a way to import my 75,000 emails from The Bat to Thunderbird. There is an import option in Thunderbird but it limits me to a few select email programs. The Bat can export in many popular formats but Thunderbird does not allow me to select where the files are to import so I’m stuck. If there is a way I’m not seeing it. I guess I will have to wait for an extension to be developed that will allow additional options to importing email or perhaps 1.0 will have that built in. I still need to check the forums and maybe I’ll find something there.
All in all I’m pretty satisfied with Thunderbird.
