Following up on my previous post about finding a new IMAP client, Microsoft has kindly forced the issue for me.

A week ago I started noticing that after going away from my computer for a while, I’d come back and notice that Outlook Express wasn’t running. Funny, I didn’t remeber closing it. Then I noticed Outlook Express was crashing, especially when I cancelled a stuck IMAP poll of my personal mail. It was happening so often that I decided to look into Thunderbird again. Dave kindly told me how to get it to poll subfolders for new mail, which was my #1 beef with it. It’s still slow, at least when redrawing the window and moving between folders, but moving between and rendering messages are pretty fast.

Even though it doesn’t have a specific configuration for, it I think it uses a default domain based on your email address, which is great. The LDAP and address autocomplete functions are really nice.

One thing I’ve had to get used to is my deleted mail moving to a Trash folder. With OE (and Apple Mail at home), I have it set up to not display messages marked for deletion, mostly because it was slow to move the messages to the trash folder. The difference with Thunderbird is that it moves it to local folder instead of a server-based folder. It doesn’t seem to have a view that hides deleted messages. This is good and bad. The good part is that it’s fast and it keeps my folders from getting huge with lots of deleted messages. (I tend to delete my mail rather than letting it accumulate in a huge list – that drives me crazy!) It also helps the IMAP server out to make it faster to check each folder for new mail. The bad part is that I only have access to my deleted mail from one computer. Sometimes I delete things a little too soon and I have to rescue some.

I’m surprised how flexible and powerful it is. And it’s open-source software that actually looks good. After a breaking in period of learning the new keyboard shortcuts and priming the spell checker, I think it should work out well. I hope they fix the redraw problems, but I fear it’s a byproduct of XUL.

It’s also free – can’t beat that. I had started trudging through configuring Mulberry, but the purchase reminders were pretty annoying and I didn’t understand half the preferences.

It’s been so long since I used Netscape regularly – I never thought I’d use another product that came out of that company. Never say never I guess.