12.04 is the worst yet

[Marcelo Magno T. Sales]

Em terça-feira 15 maio 2012, Ryan Gauger escreveu:
> Could you please explain why Thunderbird hurts? I (or somebody else
> on this ml) may be able to help you out. For me, it works better
> than Kmail because Thunderbird automatically sets up your email
> account, but I don't think Kmail does. Thanks!
> 

The main issue that prevents me from migrating to Thunderbird is that 
its local storage is mbox and this format is very prone to corruption 
and other problems when you have too many e-mails stored or when you 
receive and delete many e-mails very often. I do both and I don't like 
the idea of having all my e-mail history in the hands of some cloud 
provider. I want a local copy of my e-mail archive. People who doesn't 
mind that can use IMAP and in this case there is no storage problem. 
KMail uses mdir (one file per message) and I've never lost an e-mail 
with it. This format also makes it easier to access any message without 
running KMail if you need to (searching a backup, for example), not 
mentioning that several processes can easily access the mail storage at 
the same time without any problem at all.
This is the main problem, but there are many other features of KMail 
that do not exist in Thunderbird. KMail has quick shortcuts for anything 
you can imagine and you can customize them if you like. For example, I 
subscribe to many distribution lists and I can't possibly read all the 
e-mail I get from all of them, so I use the "delete thread" shortcut 
very often. If a thread does not interest me, I just CTRL+DEL it at 
once. Thunderbird has no shortcut for this nor it allows me to create 
one. It's painful to open the menu and click the delete thread command 
for every thread I want to delete, it's too time consuming. There are 
many, many other cases in which the lack of shortcuts or the 
impossibility to customize them get in the way.
In Thunderbird, you must have a trash folder for each of your mailboxes. 
I have eight of them and surely do not want to remember which trash do I 
need to search if I want do recover a deleted message. I KMail you can 
have individual trashes if you like, but you can setup only one trash if 
you want.
In KMail, you can configure a folder to store messages of a given 
distribution list. You filter the messages from this list to that folder 
and KMail scans the headers of the messages and automatically detects 
the commands supported by the list server. So it adds these commands to 
the right-click menu of the folder. When you right click the folder, you 
get commands like "New message to distribution list", "cancel 
subscription", and so on.
You can also define templates and the identity that should be used by 
default when you start a new message when any given folder is selected. 
You can define which dictionary should be used by default when you 
select a given identity as the sender for a message. For me, who write 
e-mails in three different languages, it's a nice feature.
You can configure a list of words that you normally use in the body of 
an e-mail when you send attachments (like attached, attachment, etc.), 
so KMail reminds you to attach the file if you use one of these words 
and click send without attaching any file.

I can go on and on for a long time listing a huge number of features 
that exist in KMail but not in Thunderbird, but you get the idea. They 
are mostly simple features and any one of them isn't a big deal by 
itself, but when you use a lot of them and remember you will lose them 
all if you migrate, then you will think twice before you do the change.

I was tempted to migrate to other e-mail client many times since when 
the KMail version from KDE 3.5.x was deprecated, because KMail is really 
buggy in its current stage. However, nevertheless I think it is still 
more advantageous to me to keep using it buggy as it is than to migrate 
for other e-mail client.

[]'s
Marcelo