When I started the new job, I was back on Windows for the first time in years, and I decided “When in the 9th Circle of Hell, do like the natives do”, so I tried reading my email via Outlook. This was too painful for words. So I switched to Thunderbird. And for 5 months I’ve been trying to like Thunderbird, but all was not well.

updates:

  • Hadley points out I can turn off “Compose as HTML” in Accounts. (I was looking and looking under Options!)
  • Cymen makes a note of how to turn it off in the config files (haven’t tried it yet)
  • Also when looking at incoming messages try choosing “Edit as New” instead of reply
  • And it was pointed out that I really should be using emacs (Dast, my boss put you up to that didn’t he?)

Thanks all!

Now Thunderbird has been a servicable little application for reading email, and in generally I’m quite happy with its IMAP support, and it has been kind of fun to be able to double click on an attachment and have it open (unless its been mangled by Outlook into a winmail.dat file). And the search is nice, if a tad slow, and while I never seem to use it, the threaded view works great.

Thunderbird however is a just lousy when it comes to writing email, which always seemed to me to be a key piece of the puzzle. Instead of just showing me the damn message it insists on interpretting it for me, turing ‘>’ into thin blue lines, and formatting some text monospace, other bold, other plain. Today I finally hit the wall, trying to respond to an only moderately complex message, I noticed I had spent 5 minutes dancing around Thunderbird, trying to get it to support the double nested replied content ‘>>’, without accidently adding newlines, or arbitarily wrapping the text I was trying to reply into my reply paragraph.

So I switched back to using Pine, the only mail client I’ve ever used that works. I run it remotely against our IMAP server, and run Thunderbird locally to act as the world’s most complex biff app.

Life is good again.

(which reminds me where is the RSS reader for Pine? I suppose the same place as any other good Pine plugin, squashed by UW’s license)