Ok i’m convinced. This longtime Eudora user is going to try teh t-bird.
Before I commit, can you answer these questions?
1- What’s the deal with different instances of the program vs. different profiles? One thing I’ve loved about Eudora over Outlook is that I have 3 separate installs of Eudora - me, mom, brother. All are different Eudora.exe and I can put 3 different shortcuts on the desktop for us (so my bro doesn’t have to switch to his XP login to view his mail - he can just open from my desktop).
Having to log in to the mail program or some crap before I can get my mail doesn’t sound like my cup of tea. I also like how attachment folders and mailboxes are separate, etc.
I couldn’t find any quick info on this on the mozilla site.
2- How is mail stored? I can’t hang with the weird way Outlook does it, with PST files or somesuch. I’ve never lost a piece of mail in 8 years and at least 8 re-installs and everyone I know with Outlook only has their email since the last re-install because of some fizzle with Outlook export/import.
Eudora has handy .toc and .mbx files - one for each mailbox. They’re flat files, easy to read in Notepad, and so far have proven to be very “safe”.
What does Thunderbird do in this regard?
Those are the two issues (other than viruses, I guess) that keep me using Eudora over Outlook.
If you can think of any other reason - other than price - that I will love T-Bird over Eudora, let me know.
I’m not sure about this. I would guess that Profiles is the better solution for most users, but that obviously doesn’t apply to you. Sorry.
Apparently, it stores them as one giant plaintext file called “Inbox”. All the messages and attachments (still UU/base64 encoded) are included in this long file.
If you have more than one account, you can either choose to have mail from each account stored in a different folder or have all mail stored in one single folder for your entire profile.
But why do you even want to use Thunderbird if Eudora is working fine for you?
In Thunderbird you can use the profile manager to create a different profile for each user; having multiple installs of the program itself will do nothing for you. Each profile can have its own themes, extensions, etc. You can create shortcuts to those profiles and put them on the desktop so that you can launch Thunderbird with a specific profile by clicking on the shortcut, if that’s what you want.
Thunderbird uses the mbox format for mail folders. Each mail folder will exist on disk as the foldername plus foldername.msf, such as Inbox and Inbox.msf, Trash and Trash.msf, Sent and Sent.msf, and you can create as many folders and subfolders as you want. These are plain-text files. Unlike Eudora, Thunderbird does NOT store attachments separately.
Thunderbird features that I especially like:
[ul]
[li]Spam filtering. Some people say that Thunderbird’s spam filtering doesn’t work so well, but for me it catches probably 95% of the spam I get. Not sure how this compares to Eudora’s.[/li]
[li]Saved searches (virtual folders): e.g., to show all messages I’ve received in the past 2 days, regardless of what folders or subfolders they’re actually stored in.[/li]
[li]Thunderbird works with non-Western character sets. That’s what drove me to leave Eudora in the first place.[/li]
[li]Unwanted, “sponsored” buttons don’t get automatically added to the toolbar. OK, this isn’t a Thunderbird feature as much as it is a Eudora annoyance. At least it was in sponsored version 5.x.[/li]
[li]The development process is very open, warts and all. If you do a little digging at mozilla.org and mozillazine.org, you can get an idea of what’s planned for Thunderbird (roadmap), what things are currently in development, what bugs are being fixed, etc. Most people probably don’t care about this kind of thing, but I like knowing what I can look forward to.[/li][/ul]
This isn’t to say Thunderbird’s the perfect mail client. Eudora’s handling of signatures (esp. choosing signatures on the fly) is much better, for instance, and if you’re happy with Eudora then I wouldn’t switch just for the sake of switching.
For more info on Thunderbird I’d recommend the mozillazine knowledge base and forums (links are in upper right corner here).
Well, i don’t have much new info to add, because lostinspace has pretty well covered it. Just wanted to say that i recently switched to Thunderbird, and so far i’m very happy with it.
Although i must say that i don’t understand your concern with Outlook’s .pst file. I had Outlook for quite a while, and i found that the single .pst file made backing up and transferring my mail extremely easy, and i never lost a single message through one change of computer and at least two other reinstalls of Windows.