[Kde-pim] Thunderbird experiences

Wed Mar 28 11:31:55 BST 2012

I also am a former Kontact user who was forced to use Thunderbird since a few 
months due to bugs in Kontact/Kde-Pim/akonadi/nepomuk.

My experiences in brief:

1) It takes a long time to get Thunderbird working the way Kontact does from 
the start. 

2) it takes a lot of addons, even for the simplest tasks like keyboard 
shortcuts.

3) Even with addons it can't do all I need. Examples: 
- no shortcut is possible for "move mail to folder followed by selection list 
of folders like in kmail"?
- working connections to groupware servers? Nope.
- syncing? Nope.
- there's many more

4) BUT: In contrary to Kontact 4.4 and newer, TB works also on Ubuntu and 
Mint - and perfectly. Neither does it crash nor does it loose mail or other 
stuff. The things promised simply work.

5) Adress autocompletion works in TB. 

6) The search and index function of TB is simply sensational. Especially 
compared to akonadi - sorry folks, here comes the unbearable truth. With TB I 
cannot determine a CPU-hungry indexer running, nor can I see several 
processes or threads that build the index. How on earth do they do that? 

And the result is great: I have about 10 GByte of Mail storage in three 
accounts, and the search manages to list all mails to an adress or containing 
specified text within less than 2 seconds. Unbelievable. I couldn't see that 
in Kmail.

7) The statistics the indexer creates are incredibly good and thorough. Wow.

Nevertheless, what I would want is: 

The Thunderbird backend and the Kontact frontend, or at least: The storage and 
indexer of thunderbird as backend for Kontact. Is that impossible? I'm sad 
that I have to use Thunderbird since three months now. BTW: On my Terminal 
server I am running KDE 3.5. Kontact and Kmail works fine, with Kolab 
connection, still today. Isn't that weird? Those were the good old times, I 
guess.

On 20.03.2012, 09:15, Thomas Koch wrote:
> Hi,
>
> for my new Laptop I installed Icedove (Thunderbird) 8 instead of KMail.
> I wanted to try sth else after 4+ actually satisfactory years with KMail.
>
> So maybe you like some experiences?
>
> - There's no option in Thunderbird to select threading and ordering
> globally. All folders by default are ordered with oldest first and non
> threading, which is annoying.
>
> - In KMail, when I send a mail, the composer windows immediately closes
> and I can continue to work. In Thunderbird the composer windows only
> closes after the message has been sent successfully.
>
> - GPG mails look much nicer in KMail. The Thunderbird UI even made me
> believe some message would be signed while it only quoted a signed
> message from me.
>
> - Thunderbird only downloads messages when I enter the folder. The "Get
> Mail" method seems to work only on the INBOX folder. A method to
> synchronize all folders is well hidden in the "offline" menu item.
>
> - Kmail (or Kontakt?) provides an UI to show what it is currently doing
> in the lower right edge. Thunderbird only has one Status line where
> messages quickly hush away.
>
> - Thunderbird can not combine threading and date headers. I very much
> miss the date headers from KMail in my message list.
>
> - When selecting multiple messages, KMail shows me the last selected
> message while Thunderbird shows a kind of summary of all selected
> messages. I like KMail's way to quickly scan and select a couple of
> mails to delete.
>
> - I've not yet used multiline list views since the old laptop has a wide
> screen. But now with the small screen I'm missing such an option in
> Thunderbird. Only now I discovered the customizable list design! That's
> real fancy stuff!
>
> - It seems, KMail is waaaay more configurable.
>
> - The Debian Icedove package somehow screwed up clickable links.
>
> - I haven't found an option to minimize Thunderbird to the system tray.
>
> - The folder list only shows number of unread messages in a folder, but
> not total number.
>
> The only thing that I liked about Thunderbird is that I can switch on
> and off the message body view with one keypress. In general KMail could
> be optimized to make better use of the screen. On a small screen I'd
> actually like to have individual full screen views of folders, message
> list and message body and the ability to quickly switch between those
> with a keypress.
>
> Well. After all, I might remain with KMail in the end. Thunderbird might
> be nice for a casual email user but not if email is half your
> (professional) life.
>
> Just please take care not to screw up my mails! Please!
>
> Regards, Thomas Koch
> _______________________________________________
> KDE PIM mailing list kde-pim at kde.org
> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-pim
> KDE PIM home page at http://pim.kde.org/

-- 

Best Regards - Mit freundlichen Grüßen, 

Markus Feilner

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