I met Oji the other day. He works on Outlook Express. He was surprised that I used Thunderbird to read my personal mail.

As aside: I’m an earn-your-business kind of guy. I want people to use what I make because they choose it and it delights them. I don’t care if people use it as the default; eventually they’ll choose something or they’ll revert back to it when something changes the default and its worse. But I hate it when people use what I make, especially in its early stages, because they feel obligated for some reason. I think people should use the best product for their needs, period. Even if their company makes a competing, if in your opinion inferior, product. Case in point, people in the industry like to point out how many people at Microsoft use Google over MSN Search. Well, for now, until I and the rest of the team make a product that our fellow employees want to use because it’s better, they should. I’m all for dogfooding (e.g. using our own products to provide feedback), but we get thousands of e-mails a day giving us feedback. We don’t need another 40,000 people sending us more feedback… really, we know we’re not doing as well as we can on long queries and searching MSDN. They’re on the list. Really.

Back to Thunderbird and Outlook Express… I’ve been using Mozilla / Thunderbird for some years now, having finally given up GNUS on Emacs as I wanted something that handled the GUI aspects of mail writing a bit better — spell checking, easily attaching files, easily browsing attachments, etc. Now, I have a rather straightforward mail setup. My mail is stored on a server that uses IMAPS, which is just IMAP that requires SSL connections to keep the mail / password secure. The only non-standard (but non-rare) is that I don’t have a signed certificate for SSL — but this should just trigger a “Are you sure?” warning the first time.

I tried Outlook Express, or OE, a few times here and there. It’s really just never worked for me. In particular, earlier versions just didn’t handle IMAPS at all well… POP was fine, but it wasn’t like the IMAP protocol was all that old, nor was SSL. They just weren’t popular enough for the features to really be nailed in those versions of OE. Fine. The Mozilla suite and then Thunderbird provided a fine alternative.

After talking with Oji, he was emphatic that my gripes had been solved. I was skeptical, but hey, he’s very knowledgable about the product, so I should give him the benefit of the doubt. I won’t change unless it’s strictly better — just the same means I have to learn a slightly different interface and control keys. Change sucks unless you get something for it.

So I tried it. IMAP setup still sucks. Thunderbird’s isn’t great either, as with both you have to go into the settings after you do the initial wizard to set it to SSL. However, OE doesn’t appear to be able to differentiate between UNIX-style folders and mail folders (e.g. folders can contain other folders or mail, but not both. This is because folders are real folders and mail folders are files. Some other styles allow folders to contain both mail and other folders). And when I tried to import all my folders, they didn’t appear. Seems I have to go to each individual folder to have it show up. Maybe I’m doing something wrong, but really, I don’t want to have to think about my mail application. It should just work.

Here are some screenshots of the two side-by-side… as you can see, they’re very similar:

Outlook Express	Thunderbird

Some comments:

• There’s too much white space and extraneous stuff in OE. OE has a lot of random columns for things I don’t know and probably won’t use. There’s also a window for Contacts. Why do I need this here? After the “new mail” dialog is where I’d want to get a contact, but auto-complete is really the killer feature here.
• The initial mail window in OE is itty-bitty… I suspect it retains the resizing you immediately do, but come on…
• One of the most useful features in Thunderbird is integrated RSS feeds. It isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty close to what I want — treat blog posts as mail (or, more similar to USENET news). It’s a bit of a drag when there’s lots of posts, e.g. you don’t read Scoble for a while, but for most blogs that post every now and then, it’s great. It’s also integrated into the right tool… when I’m reading mail, I want to read updates from people — public mail, if you will. Having to click through zillions of sites in a browser is a pain, and having to use yet another client is also a pain.
• The OE guys still haven’t fixed the issue about non-trusted certificates. When Thunderbird encounters a cert that doesn’t have a trusted root, it asked if you want to allow it this time, permanently, or never. The permanent option is just that — you never see this again. With OE, you always have to accept it… just a start-up drag. I also noticed that I had to go to my nested folders again — they weren’t shown in the folder list by defailt for some reason. Lame.

OK… so, I haven’t found anything that makes me drool over OE, and I’ve got enough issues here that I don’t see any reason to move to OE anyway. I’m not asking for a ton here… just a good mail client that handles IMAPS running on a personal server with a non-trusted root cert. Nothing more, nothing less. Sure, Thunderbird has some issues, but IMHO OE still has more for what I need. Thus, until Oji fixes that, I’ll still be a Thunderbird user. Sorry Oji!

PS - Oji did promise to hand-deliver me a CD of the new version of OE as soon as it’s ready, and says that they’ll fix all my big issues. We’ll see.

This entry was posted 4 years, 2 months ago on Thursday, December 15th, 2005 at 11:59 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.