I’m liking the new Thunderbird

Ok, so this will definitely jinx it, but… Thunderbird 2 is looking nice. So far, it’s stable (I’m always hesitant to put important data into an alpha, but with backups aplenty I feel ok about it).

Useful new features:

• unread folder view makes me a lot more efficient at dealing with incoming mail
• better tagging instead of just the prioritised 5 labels
• nice new biff in the tray that shows the subjects of the new messages arriving

Things that I’d still like to see:

• as acknowledged in the release notes, the 0-9 keys need to be wired up to the new tags
• I still can’t search subfolders for tags in an imap account (considering it caches locally and I have it setup for offline use downloading all the messages, I can’t understand why)
• there’s no “search for messages with any tag” (which I could do before with “label is not none”). Really a nitpick, as I can search by “tag is todo” or “tag is work” or… though if I get too many tags that’ll be tedious (but then that search would lose its helpfulness too)
• sorting by tag will not be alphabetical – I’d still like to prioritise them (without calling them 1 – Important, 2 – Work, 3 – Waiting, etc)
• when you read all the mail in a folder, it doesn’t get removed from the unread folders view unless you circle out and back (though I guess this could be by design)
• don’t show trash and junk folders in the unread/recent folder views
• I’d like multiple folder views on the left – probably “unread” at the top, then “favourite” below that.
• I really wish they’d get rid of the Ctrl-Q key binding. Who really needs an unconfirmed quit from an email app? For some reason, I’ve been hitting that a lot more lately looking for another key in the vicinity.

So, much like Firefox 2 – nothing huge, but enough to feel it is worth using.

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