I have a confession to make.  It's a geeky one, so nothing exciting, but still.

I really don't like Mozilla Thunderbird.  I've been using that and Firefox for years now, and I really do think Firefox is an excellent browser.  The problem I have with Thunderbird is that the second I try and do anything with it that isn't just simple sending and receiving of email it fails miserably. Have a list:

• Searching.  I can never find the search option.  Then when I do, it opens pop up windows and gives me far too many options.  Quick search, that would be nice.  There probably is one that I haven't found yet.
• Filtering messages - fairly often I want to view only unread messages.  Once again, this involves getting lost in the menus.  Far too much hassle!
• Address Book.  It's rubbish.  And funnily enough, I can never find it.  Even more rubbish is you can't export the address book in any kind of useful format!  Like .csv.  I'd quite like a csv list of my contacts please.. [edit - oh right, it does, but the option is very well hidden on the rubbish file save dialog..]

If they tidied the menus up so things are in sensible place I'd probably be a lot happier with it.  After two years of use you'd think I'd have got the hang of where stuff is, but no.  I could probably find extensions that do some of the stuff I want, but meh. Of course, there are other email clients out there, but I've never felt bothered to use them.  Used to use outlook express very briefly, then mozilla mail.  Apart from that, it's always been webmail of some variety.  I use Outlook at work though, and am rather ashamed to admit that I actually quite like it

So as an interesting expiriment I've moved my email for this domain onto gmail.  Partly because I don't like it when I can't get my email because the server's down, and partly because then I don't have to be constantly using thunderbird. heh.  So stop sending mail to my BT account, because I'll probably forget to check it (mum, that means you )

Big problem here is that I'm not overly keen on the gmail interface (for starters, it's ugly as hell).  But I never really gave it a chance, because when I got my gmail account it was mostly just for novelty value.  We'll see.  I can always go back if I really don't like it.

tags: email geeky