Thoughts About

Thunderbird 1.5: some good, some bad

You know, Thunderbird *is* the best mail client at the moment. While I also think that Gmail is probably the best web application and definitely the best web mail, a real, rich client is just more usable in many situations (though I still wouldn't seriously use any other mail protocol than IMAP), especially on your laptop, when you don't always have network connection. I've also been using Thunderbird to read (RSS) feeds even though I would have happily used some other RSS feed manager if it had the option to sort/read multiple feeds by time in a single folder and automatically delete the old items, but I just couldn't find one. You see, to me the RSS feeds are only useful if they are fresh. I can always google it up later if I need to find something specific, but news are only news when they are new, and I really don't care about the source anymore after I've already configured the feeds I want to read. So when I heard Thunderbird 1.5 added just these features, I was pretty excited.

I'm always terrified when I upgrade my mail client. I really don't need a two-hour bug tracking session with my email client much less loosing email or not being able to trust it getting and showing all the mail I get. It wouldn't the first time Thunderbird messed up someting in my settings so you can imagine that I was first delighted to see everything seemed ok but afterwards pretty frustrated when I noticed that Thunderbird simply refused to read any new feeds.

A little bit of googling, and I found Ron Miller's blog entry on this. The bug was logged on Mozilla's Bugzilla a long time ago, but hey, seriously, who in the open source world cares really about backwards compatibility - I don't exactly blame them. Anyway, looks like I wasn't the only one with a broken RSS reader, but luckily, after trying restarting (that others said will help, of course it didn't for me) the solution was fairly easy. Just delete the existing feeds and subscribe to them again. Now the items start popping up normally. And ah - no information overloading - just the newest news, categorized the way I want from the sources I like and trust!