Thunderbird is basically the only email client that works the way I expect an email client to work, but it has some real warts that I wish they'd fix. They're not flashy UI things though, they're stuff around how it handles very large imap folders.
If you have hundreds of thousands of emails within reach of thunderbird it will by default download all of them. Try to index all of them. And it will devour your CPU and disk space and RAM to do it. Every time I set it up again for the first time it's a race to turn off the excessive indexing before it irreversably decides to chew up gigs of my disk and permanently be stuck using at least 2-3GB of RAM when loaded. And it's really hard to find all the indexing options.
How do you deal with search? Faceted search is driving me insane (always need to have an extra click to show as list, then another to view without threading).
Actually I find TB's search so much more helpful than GMail's.
For a company that built its reputation on search, google's ranking of results are remarkably crap. I often find myself spending multiple minutes trying to find an email I know I replied to just hours before and they just never show up. Terrible...
I wish thunderbird had better search functionality.
For instance I can't specify that I am looking for mail either to or from a specific sender trough the search UI, only mails with an address as both to/from, which litters the results with mailing lists that have 100s of recipients.
Due to this, I often resort to zimbra for searching my mail box. The interface is much more effective.
Thunderbird does support this. You're using the "Search" box in the UI - use ctrl-shift-F to search in Mail and choose "match any of the following" in the UI and specify 2 rules - one for to, one for from.
The Search from the main window's search box isn't that useful - the "find in mail" is much better.
Wow, this looks so much better, thank you. The search box isn't very usable, yet that's the only thing I discovered until now.
It doesn't help that, at least the French version, the menu entry for that function is cut (and looks like "search in m..."). "Advanced search" (the window title) sounds like a more descriptive and better title.
Thunderbird does not have beautiful UI, and is not as “geeky” as some terminal-based email clients. Still it is one of the standard email clients which sysadmins try to teach users to use, but I have the feeling that it is the old people who stick to Thunderbird.
Anyone have a good solution for syncing Google contacts? The extension I used stopped working a few versions ago and, last time I checked, wasn't planning to support Google accounts.