Thunderbird still sucks

The last time I used Mozilla Thunderbird it was in Windows, I was trying to stay away from Outlook. Eventually it was so infuriating that it drove me back to Outlook.

That was over two years ago.

I also tried to use Mail.app but the problem is that it doesn't play nice with Outlook. My boss uses Outlook, that means *I* have to make sure I send the emails so he can see them OK, not the other way around. There is a weird incompatibility between Mail.app and Outlook due to Unicode: sometimes Outlook can't tell that the message should be set to Unicode.

The only fix I know is to add a Unicode character to my signature, which would force the whole message to be Unicode and Outlook will see it properly.

I switched back to Mail.app a couple of months ago because I did not wanted to keep Parallels open just to reply to work email, and the Unicode signature hack more or less worked, but I found another problem: many times I was replying to emails thinking it was in rich text mode, when in reality it was sending the email in plain text, something that dear leader hates.

This week I finally broke down and tried the newest Thunderbird. To my dismay, it could not even import emails from Mail.app, and their instructions on how to do it by hand were completely and absolutely wrong. After three or four days I found a program that lets me export Mail.app mailboxes one at a time, then a Thunderbird extension that can read these exported files.

The end result? I got all 25,000 or so emails, but once again, I hate Thunderbird.

1. Search sucks.



2. The preferences suck.



3. It took me over five minutes to find out where the hell to change my signature.



4. My signature comes out as plain text no matter what. If I add html markup to it, it encodes it. If I try rich text, it encodes it.



5. No smart mailboxes!

I could go on.

I even tried Mailsmith, but it is god damn ugly, and it won't do html emails. I hate Eudora with passion, there is no way in hell I am going to use that voluntarily. And I can't use my favorite email, Gmail, because when I use impersonation Outlook says "email sent by user@gmail.com on behalf of user@domain.com."

What else is out there for 10.5? Even if it costs money, I just want something that works at least as good as Mail.app but with less html email drama.