Despite the success of Firefox and the improvements in 3.0, I’m not on the “Mozilla can do no wrong bandwagon”. Not only is Thunderbird, its mail client, nowhere near an Outlook killer yet, but it has problems that most mail clients solved years ago.
Regardless of version I’ve tried for Windows, either right on the desktop or the portable version, it’s taken 10 minutes to boot and then freezes or crashes. My searches for the the solution to the problem have found that Thunderbird needs you to compact folders regularly and that these slowdowns are common to many users.
As a user, I should not have to worry about this. For all the complaints that Microsoft makes bloatware, Outlook 2003 starts in a millisecond and never slows down for me.
I would love to be a Thunderbird user, but right now it’s barely a good beta product, let alone production environment software.
