Thunderbird: Free Email Not Ready For Prime Time.

Devesh said:

@Wm,

To each his own.

But there is no point going negative on anyone/anything just because of our pre-dispositions.

There must be a reason beyond the usual “Microsoft” why Outlook and Office are so dominant in the Windows world, and that is productivity. Let us not forget Word and Excel were born on the Mac and today are killer apps in the Windows world.

No doubt Outlook is bloated, but as you too acknowledged, it is a feature rich PIM. For simple e-mail there are many clients.

My comment was what Apple needs to do to produce a similar killer “lock-in” application that will ease transition to the Mac and keep users there.

Just FYI, I am using Thunderbid 3 Beta 3 and find it very good. Still clunky compared to Outlook but miles ahead of Apple Mail and Entourage.

Wm. said:

Outlook? User friendly?

What planet are you on? No one, no one who’s ever used both Outlook and anything else would accuse Outlook of being user friendly. It’s bloated, complex, arcane and so loaded with features that the average Outlook user hates it with a passion.

The term you really want is ‘feature laden.’ That it is. Whatever feature has ever been thought of has been thrown into Outlook. If you’re a heavy duty email, scheduling, calendaring kinda person, and you’ve got a hankering for electronic punishment, then Outlook is your friend. Outlook and Exchange are the ultimate ‘lock in’ tools from Microsoft.

Email is email. Read it. Reply to it. Save it. Or, delete it. But calling Outlook ‘user friendly’ is, well, bwahahahahahaa!

Devesh said:

Back in 1984 I was an early adopter of the Mac Plus. After many years of wandering in the PC world, I finally got sick of Vis(puke)ta and got myself a MacBook Pro yesterday.

Before I get shouted down for being a noob, hear me out. Firstly being a noob is no shame. The Mac user world should appreciate that more noobs are flocking. Increasing user population will bring it’s own benefits.

E-mail is a dominant part of my work and I handle no less than 14 mail accounts. With all it’s short comings on the database front, IMHO Outlook 2007 is a killer application that makes the world come to Windows.

TB, mail, Entourage may be fine for personal mail, but productivity friendly and customisable, they are not. It is a crying shame that the ultimate in user friendliness, the Mac, does not have an application with the user friendliness and productivity features of Outlook.

Having ripped Excel and Word from the original Mac platform, Microsoft will not encourage the Mac users. Apple is going to have to knuckle down instead of sitting in its ivory tower.

And the experienced Mac users should extend a friendly hand to help noobs transition from the PC world.

We should beware of the attitude .... “the Mac world can live without more users”, I have been there in the late 80s and early 90s when it almost died.

WTSPC said:

I want to send multiple jpegs in my Mail document OSX but not inbed them in the page. I just want to show the icons. This doesn’t seem a practicable option in Mail, but handled very well in Thunderbird. I am wondering if there is an easy way to inport my existing details from Mail to Thunderbird?

BlunderTurd said:

So, you can’t tell the difference between the look and feel of a Mac application vs. a Windows application? And you spell Mac as “iMAC?” Sounds like a newbie to me. Thunderbird is a weak looking, poor excuse for an email application—not fit to be compared to Entourage or even Apple’s Mail. The importing sucks. Sure it’s a one time thing—if it works—but it takes freakin’ forever, and longer than that using the manual method. Do you honestly not see the Windows-like design of Firefox 2.x vs. say, Firefox 3.x which is very Mac-like?

Mel Stricker said:

Ok, let me understand this, Thunderbird is NOT ready for prime time because it looks like a Windows app and it wont import email from certain email apps.  The first needs more clarification what does ‘looks like a windows app’ mean?  An app looks like it does because it is coded that way (unless you definition is uniquely yours.  And the import is a ONE TIME EVENT.  Besides there is normally a non-automated way to do this to be found on the WEB (as an example - http://www.twistermc.com/blog/2005/07/20/import-apple-mail-to-thunderbird).  I have an iMAC and use Firefox.  I am not sure what to look for that makes Firefox look like a Windows app instead of just an app.