I switched to Thunderbird for my e-mail and RSS a few years ago, because it was cross-platform, open-source (so I didn’t have to worry about the company abandoning it if/when they decided they weren’t making enough money with it), and worked with GPG so I could still have my secure e-mail.

I have never been particularly happy with it, though. I’ve always found it very inflexible and confining, coming from The Bat! under Windows. But it got the job done, and from everything I was able to find, did it better than anything else that met those three criteria. I don’t use IMAP, so the problems that it has apparently had with it were irrelevant to me.

Unfortunately, it has been getting worse over the years, not better. It’s (supposedly) under active development, but you couldn’t tell by looking at it — I started with it at version 1.0 or 1.5; it’s now at 3.1, and the only real difference I’ve seen is that it has gotten slower. Known bugs persist for years (literally!), new ones crop up regularly, and it’s no exaggeration to say that I don’t recall a single new feature that I’ve ever had any use for. So when I read this article a few months ago, and saw that it suggested alternatives, I jumped at the idea.

Of the alternatives offered, Claws seemed to garner the best opinions around the ‘net (here are a couple examples). The only mention I’ve heard of it before was from Ploni (my formerly-Linux-using friend), several years ago, and he had problems with it then. But it sounded like all of those had been worked out, so I decided to give it a try.

I hate switching e-mail programs, with a passion. I’ve done it four times before this (Outlook Express -> Something-I-Don’t-Remember -> Calypso -> The Bat! -> Thunderbird), and every time has been painful, in one respect or another. I was bracing myself for similar levels of pain this time, but to my surprise, the process went very smoothly. I was able to import all of my Thunderbird e-mail with almost no problems, I just had to do it one folder at a time, and mark the messages read again after doing so.

The program itself operates nicely, and is extremely configurable. You can, for instance, redefine the hot-keys for any menu option, by simply pointing your mouse at it and pressing the key(s) that you want to use for it (though ones that correspond to menu commands themselves, like the plain old ‘m’ key, can apparently only be set by editing a configuration file). You can tell it that when you open a folder, it should automatically go to first new message, first unread message, last message looked at, or one of several other options. And when you hide messages that have already been marked as read, the ones that you’ve checked or locked remain on the screen — very useful.

There’s no automatic-purging of old e-mail, but you can set it up to delete certain mail from particular folders after a set amount of time. It always irritated me that Thunderbird only had delete-by-age or delete-by-number-of-messages, and when using them, would delete messages regardless of whether the message had been marked read or not. That’s not a problem here, for the small price of some extra work when initially setting up the system.

The manual-rewrap in the editor works oddly. You can rewrap a paragraph manually, by going to the end of a line, deleting the end-of-line character, and hitting the space bar, but it’s not obvious at first. There may be an easier way too, but that’s the easiest I’ve discovered — the menu items related to rewrapping a paragraph only seem to work under limited circumstances. And it might not be necessary, I haven’t experimented with just leaving the paragraphs wrapped oddly when sending the message. It might reformat them automatically before they go out.

The program is lacking in two areas though.

The first: no per-recipient GPG rules. I’ve got a few people I communicate with using encryption, and I want all messages to them to be encrypted and signed. There are many others that I just want to use signing for, but there’s one particular recipient (an automated support system that BigCo uses) that can’t handle inline-signed messages — it thinks that the line starting the signed part of the message is a signature line and discards anything after it. I’ve either got to remember to manually set the proper options every time I communicate with one of those addresses, or I’ll have to patch the program to add that capability. I don’t really have the time or interest to take on a project like that though, so I haven’t decided what to do about it yet.

The second: it does no multithreading, and doesn’t handle two things at once very well at all. When it’s fetching or sending mail, the user interface all but locks up until it’s done — you can’t even close the program. I’ve got four e-mail accounts that I check regularly, all using SSL, and it can take thirty seconds to fetch mail from all of them. That’s thirty seconds that I can’t do anything else, up to and including just switching to a different message. This would probably be a harder thing to fix… there may be a way to work around it, by setting up a background program to download e-mail and another to send it, but that’s quite a bit of work. I haven’t decided whether to try it or not.

That’s the story so far. We’ll see how it turns out.