Not so concerned about Thunderbird community, more concerned about the interface and functions

[John_Tellefson]

I got into the Thunderbird/Firefox/Seamonkey community by loving Netscape Communicator 4.07, which became Mozilla when it went open-source. When was that, 1997? I used to download Mozilla nightlies and test this and that. At some point I didn't have so much time for that, but I used Mozilla and then Seamonkey for years and just now am trying to convert to Firefox and Thunderbird. It's very awkward to click on an email link in FF and open a Seamonkey mail compose page and then hop back to FF. So I started the TB link in my Debian 12 distro, ran the "migrate from Seamonkey" code and found a few issues with both the migration and the TB interface.

The migration issue I've noticed so far is that addressbook info is not correctly migrated. When I try to compose an email to a buddy or anyone, the list of possible email addresses to choose from does not appear. The screen says no addresses are found---for anyone. Hmmm.

In trying to compose a msg, there's no obvious place to click or tab to to open a compose window. Ditto for addressbook, reply, reply-all, forward, next, back, junk, delete, mark, etc that can be set to display in the SM mail page, and the more extensive menus across the top of the screen. The children who've made the TB user interface apparently don't have a lot of familiarity with a full-featured email client. Seriously. Those missing clickable functions clearly make a lot of TB capabilities obscure for no good reason.

Having the more compact list of one line vs three lines per message in the message list, having just one account header instead of two (evidently one for recent, one for all msgs), buttons to click next or back in the messages, ways to select multiple msgs to mark to be junked, trashed or moved, migration that actually migrates my Seamonkey data. Compose window controls to set font, size, color and background would be nice. Maybe they're there but they aren't obvious because the compose new msg link isn't obvious.

Developers, you don't need to try to work on the community, just bring back the easy-usability features in Seamonkey mail. Fire up Seamonkey and try it out and you will see the good stuff you've removed.

BTW, in migration, I see that TB now makes its own dot-thunderbird folder to operate in, with its mail folders there. This makes working with Seamonkey very awkward. I am not seeing any good reason why TB shouldn't just continue working with the mail data already in the main dot-mozilla folder holding Seamonkey and FF info.

One obvious problem of using a separate mail folder is that SM Mail may hold a different set of msgs than are in TB. The only dodge for this is that one email client promises to download msgs onto local files and the other one promises not to. This should already have been figured out years ago, but I don't know for sure what the new TB running in a migrated set of data actually does, or whether TB pulls updated data out of the Seamonkey folder.

Back in the day when I was running Windows 98SE along with Mozilla/Seamonkey, I used the Windows data folder in both Windows and Linux, and Mozilla was happy to work with that Windows Mozilla folder running Mozilla in either Windows or Linux. It was so easy and convenient then. 🙂

[John_Tellefson]

Oh, lovely. I just opened the TB account settings and from that page I tried opening the server settings. It wouldn't let me, giving the error msg that "An account with that name already exists. Please enter a different account name." So I clicked on "copies and folders" and then TB let me click on server settings. How about doing some better debugging and more thoughtful coding? You really need us old coots.

In those server settings, one line with a checkbox says "Leave msgs on server", under it the choices are "no more than 14 days" (that's adjustable) and the next one says "until I delete them." Both checked by default. Illogical.

I'd still like to know why I have two main folders with the same account name. Correct migration should produce just one set of mail folders with my main account folder name. Am I the only guy who's observed that that's a big bug in migration?

[siffemcon]

You should report it as a possible [bug](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi/).

[John_Tellefson]

Good idea. I don't think I have bugzilla.mozilla.org in my bookmarks anymore. Thanks.

[wsm]

Import bug at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1982366