Welcome Thunderbird, Goodbye Evolution

Disclaimer: What you will find mostly in this post is - RANT.

I have been using Evolution email client for more than three years from now. I have moved my mails stored in the .evolution folder from computer to computer. Evolution has handled literally millions of emails for me in these years. On the flip side, I have suffered many agonies with Evolution. After every few days Evolution would download all the messages in my POP account again and mark them as unread. The re-downloading thingy has strained my bandwidth several times. Sometimes the password prompt for the email accounts would appear for no reason I could ever imagine. Any password I typed in those prompts would always return an error message followed by another two prompts to type in the password. I swear I had typed the correct password. Oh my, Evolution was supposed to remember my passwords as per my saved preferences. The "summary mismatch" error message is another frequent troublemaker. After restarting the application few times it seemed to correct itself somehow.

When I stored large number of emails in one folder, the application would give a sluggish performance. I had to slice them and store less number of emails in different folders. The worst experience was with missing emails. When Evolution was learning junk, I could not afford to move another email in the inbox to any folder. Whenever I tried, all the emails would disappear into oblivion. I was never able to locate the missing emails. They were not in the trash folder, they were not in any other folder. They were not available anymore in the file system. Yet another memorable bad experience was with the preferences window in 800x600 screen resolution. The "Close" button was never visible at lower screen resolutions. I had to blindly play with the tab key and other keyboard shortcuts to save the preferences.

The last time I used evolution was when it ate away my important emails in the inbox. There were about twenty emails in my inbox. I read and deleted couple of them. I read the third message in the inbox and was moving it to another folder. In front of my eyes the rest of the messages in the inbox vanished. I did not have a copy of those messages on the server to recover them. I lost them forever. That is when I decided not to use Evolution anymore.

I have also been using Thunderbird for a while. I have never faced any problem with Thunderbid so far. It never brings up the password dialog boxes unreasonably. It never says anything about mismatched summaries. Its performance is simply amazing. The added convenience of reading news and blogs through RSS is a very useful feature. Reading emails and feeds in a single application makes perfect sense. The one feature which I liked most in Evolution is signature switch. While composing the message you can select from any signatures you have configured. I found the same feature by installing the signature switch add-on to Thunderbird. The only thing that is a little weird with Thunderbird is you can't move your email accounts and their associated folders up and down whenever you feel like it. I solved this problem by installing the Folderpane Tools add-on. I would recommend Thunderbird to anyone. Thunderbird's user interface is also cool. I hope I will have little problems with the desktop email clients in the coming year.

Go reclaim your inbox at http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/.

For those of you who would like to know how to install Thunderbird on your Linux box: If you are using Fedora or a GNU/Linux distribution that uses yum for package management, you can install it using the below command: