opinios

Thunderbird Wishlist

I use Mozilla Thunderbird as my primary mail client, and love it. It has terrific anti-spam features and great support for RSS, which is important for someone like me who reads a lot of feeds; some browsers also support RSS, but when you are trying to stay on top of thirty or forty sites a browser just doesn't cut it, it needs an email-like interface.

However, there are quite a few things that annoy me about Thunderbird. I haven't looked through the list of bugs that the hard-working Mozilla team are squirrelling away on, but these are the features/bugs that I would love to see fixed before declaring this little application to be the ultimate mail client. I hope some of them are in the pipeline:

1. integration of calendar; there is a calendar component for Thunderbird, but it doesn't have the same level of integration that Outlook currently supports.
2. better RSS feed management: yes, I know I mentioned it does do a half-decent job, but
   • the blurred line between folders and feeds is confusing. If I delete a folder, the posts, are also deleted. But what happens to my subscription? Where do future posts go?
   • there's no way to sort managed feeds by name, URL, date added etc.
   • it automatically sorts feed posts by ascending date; I prefer descending, so that my most recent reads are at the top. Currently, each time you add a feed you have to re-sort this. It would be cool to be able to set a property where it did this by default.


3. same deal with email: you can't set an ascending date sort for new folders by default, only on a per-folder basis
4. a way of storing your list of feeds remotely (eg. on your own server much like IMAP email) would be way cool. I'd like to be able to read my feeds on different computers without having to configure them all manually. Yes, I know about bloglines, but I'd prefer it in my mail client.
5. It needs a more prominent indicator when communicating with the server. The tiny "receiving 1 of 2 messages" displayed in the status bar at the bottom is easy to miss.
6. better handling of multiple attachments is an absolute must. I subscribe to one mailing list which is delivered in digest mode, with up to 50 attachments. Unfortunately I can't read this at all with Thunderbird as there is no scroll bar when the list of attachments takes up all the message space. Very annoying.
7. The ability to turn off yes/no prompt when navigating using the previous/next buttons. That's just annoying too. What do you mean "Am I sure I want to move to the next folder?" Of course I'm sure, that's why I pressed "Next"!
8. Using the "Next" button sometimes jumps to the next folder that contains an unread message, but doesn't load the message, sometimes even when you highlight the message! Actually, the "Next" button gets confused quite often. If I am on unread message number 4 and click Next, it sometimes jumps to unread message number 1. Shouldn't it jump to the next folder?
9. The Spellbound inline spell checker plug-in works well, but highlighting with the keyboard gets screwed up. Especially if you use the Shift+arrow keys to do it.
10. Converting between HTML and raw text can get screwed up, even with simple formatting like bold and italics, which end up looking like *this* and /this/.
11. It would be nice to be able to control the "quote" character. Under the hood it's ">" but when editing it's a different colour line, whether you like it or not.
12. The other day Thunderbird crashed on me and lost track of which of my feeds were unread. When I launched it again it proceeded to pull in duplicates of every one of the posts I had already downloaded. This was when I realised how many feeds I subscribed to, when I had to go through each and every folder and set it as "unread".
13. Being able to choose between reading the raw text of a feed post or view the HTML page in the message body window is cool, but if the page is behind a login window, it's not quite so easy to configure. You can set things up so that your cookies from Firefox are used by Thunderbird, but it requires more technical know-how than should be expected of your average user.

Like I said, Thunderbird is a good product, and I don't mean to have a whinge especially when it is free! But if the things on this list were fixed up, it would be a fantastic product.

PS. If anyone knows how to set any of the above defaults by performing jiggery-pokery with the configuration files, speak up!