I’ve come back to using Thunderbird full-time lately.

I mean, I hadn’t stopped using it for older IMAP accounts, but it wasn’t exactly on a daily basis. I’d also come to use it for GMail accounts, but more as an easy way to shuffle messages across accounts than actual primary use.

And a short time ago, some chap on the internal support channels asked a question pertaining to the modalities of accessing their corporate Outlook account using Thunderbird. I didn’t answer. I’m a natural helpful character, I’m not so good at telling people “you can’t do this” without them resenting me in return, unless I spend quite some time phrasing the response properly; and I simply didn’t have that much free time then.

But their problem phrasing did seem curious, so I figured I might as well try and reproduce, if only to see what the experience was like. So I tried to follow a normal person’s path at configuring my work email account in Thunderbird, to see where in the process it would fail.

And then the unexpected happened.

It worked fine on the first try, without even trying!

So… switching from the online webapp we Linux users are supposed to use was a no-brainer that took me an entire day of use to convince myself I’d never want to have to deal with that mail server in any other way.

I had tens of thousands of messages lagging behind waiting to be classified. I didn’t want to address them because the UI was so slow. Laggy when it came to filter them, laggy when it came to select them, laggy when it came to move them to their destination folder. And limited to whatever the page height is. With weird caching issues that made the filtered view unreliable most of the time. Horribly inconvenient.

I cleared that queue in a single sitting.

I am missing the old facility from the Outlook heavy client to define a key binding that sends the current message or the selected message set to a specific folder. There’s always the “Move message to the same folder as the last move operaion”, that’s quite practical, but very easy to get wrong accidentally.

But more on that later.