Thunderbird Sucks. E-Mail Sucks.
Jan. 10th, 2007 11:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
athelindI need a new e-mail program.
Some background:
For years, I used Pegasus. It was kind of annoying, because I had half-a-dozen e-mail accounts, and Peg dumps everything into a single inbox. I set up filters to direct mail from different accounts into different folders, but Peg doesn't have an option for "account you downloaded from". If you try to pick out "To:", no matter how many filter rules you add, multi-person cc:s and bcc:s will always slip through the cracks.
As spam became a bigger and bigger part of e-mail traffic, I just... stopped checking mail. I got out of the habit. I let it pile up to the point that I COULDN'T deal with it. Pegasus -- at least the older version I was using -- didn't have any spam filter capacity.
Quel switched to Mozilla Thunderbird a couple of years ago, and I've long put off following suit -- in fact, part of my e-mail procrastination was "I'll catch up and start checking it regularly when I get Thunderbird installed." A major hinderance was that I have an idiosyncratic system configuration: as far as I can manage it, I reserve my 20-gig C: drive for applications only, and I set up those applications to save documents and data onto the 80-gig D: drive. Given my druthers, I'd druther not use the nested Windows "Documents and Settings" folders at all.
While Pegasus will let you change the location of the MAIL folder without issue, the standard version of Thunderbird has no simple or convenient way do do so. Instructions abound online for using C++ to apply PERL commands to grep the edlin logedit of the INI file -- okay, I'm making that up, but it's a convoluted set of hoops for something that should be a simple dialogue box. Trying to move the folders to the D: drive, as one site suggested, left Thunderbird drooling like the victim of a 72-hourBeavis and Butthead marathon.
Finally, I went with Thunderbird Portable, a version designed to run off a thumb drive or other portable media. It's self-contained, so it doesn't treat a permanently-installed drive as any different from a removable drive.
Unfortunately, that doesn't mean it's stable.
The crux of the matter is that there's something about Thunderbird that destabilizes my whole system. At first, I was opening it up and leaving it running in the background, checking for mail every few minutes. My system started acting erratically, hanging up for a few seconds at a time, and taking an unusually long time to perform simple functions like switching from window to window**.
The temperature readout on the front of my computer told me that it was well past time to dust it out; when it starts pushing 100F, it starts acting glitchy, and with the central heater running this time of year, there's that much more dust and heat to worry about. So, a couple of cans of compressed air later, and a 113F operating temp was back down to a cool, happy 84F.
And the glitches kept on coming. I'd have to reboot every couple of days.
I'm still getting back in the habit of checking mail regularly, so I'd frequently go a day or two after a reboot without firing up Thunderbird. After about a week, it dawned on me... my system ran just fine until I opened up Thunderbird. It ran notoriously resource-heavy and buggy software like Second Life, it ran with heavy multi-tasking on two monitors, it ran as well or better than ever... until. I. Opened. Thunderbird.
I started changing variables. First, I changed the settings so that it wasn't checking mail every few minutes -- it only downloaded when I specifically told it to. That didn't help; the glitches continued until I rebooted.
I changed the way I used the program: instead of leaving it open and hitting the button to check mail periodically, I'd open it, read mail, and close it immediately. It didn't matter; the system continued to destablize even with it shut down.
I think Thunderbird has a serious memory leak, or something of that nature.
And I think that, ironically, it Doesn't Play Well With Firefox, particularly when Firefox is trying to interact with other software. My MUCK client, BeipMU, features clickable links. When my system is running smoothly, they pop up without a hitch. When there's some kind of glitch, they're the canary in the coal mine. This morning, I noted that the transition from "a little twitchy" to "completely unusable" didn't happen until I clicked on links in BeipMU to open them up in Firefox.
Thunderbird had, at that point, been closed between 8 and 12 hours.
Older versions of Second Life used to do the same thing. If I had SL, BeipMU, and Firefox open all at the same time (which I do regularly), clicking on a BeipMU link would slow the whole system down like the 880 at rush hour***. On the other claw, that would clear up once SL had been shut down for a while. This glitch requires a reboot every time I open Thunderbird.
And that does not facilitate my New Year's Resolution to keep caught up with my mail.
An important note: it's not just my system.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
quelonzia reports that Thunderbird makes both her work and home systems unstable, too -- to the point of crashing, thanks to the heavy number crunching her accountantware does. However, she also says that this is a recent development; it may be something peculiar to the current version.
So, I have a twofold question:
[Poll #904263]
* If I may digress, I don't consider spam filters to be a solution. When 80-90% of the global e-mail traffic comes from unsolicited advertisements, that's a burden on the entire infrastructure. Local filtering doesn't stop that, it only hides it. There's also the contiual problem of mail that you actually want getting caught in the filter. "Oh, just go through your junk folder before you delete it all!" Um, how is that helpful? I still have to pick through all the spam to find the stuff I want to read!
** Yes, I know that from a programming standpoint, task-switching is a complex, sophisticated function, but the OS is supposedly designed to handle them at a low level, so when they get glitchy, it's a Sign Something Is Wrong.
*** For those of you who don't live in the Bay Area, the the difference between the 880 at rush hour and a parking lot is that you have some hope of getting out of the parking lot.
Some background:
For years, I used Pegasus. It was kind of annoying, because I had half-a-dozen e-mail accounts, and Peg dumps everything into a single inbox. I set up filters to direct mail from different accounts into different folders, but Peg doesn't have an option for "account you downloaded from". If you try to pick out "To:", no matter how many filter rules you add, multi-person cc:s and bcc:s will always slip through the cracks.
As spam became a bigger and bigger part of e-mail traffic, I just... stopped checking mail. I got out of the habit. I let it pile up to the point that I COULDN'T deal with it. Pegasus -- at least the older version I was using -- didn't have any spam filter capacity.
Quel switched to Mozilla Thunderbird a couple of years ago, and I've long put off following suit -- in fact, part of my e-mail procrastination was "I'll catch up and start checking it regularly when I get Thunderbird installed." A major hinderance was that I have an idiosyncratic system configuration: as far as I can manage it, I reserve my 20-gig C: drive for applications only, and I set up those applications to save documents and data onto the 80-gig D: drive. Given my druthers, I'd druther not use the nested Windows "Documents and Settings" folders at all.
While Pegasus will let you change the location of the MAIL folder without issue, the standard version of Thunderbird has no simple or convenient way do do so. Instructions abound online for using C++ to apply PERL commands to grep the edlin logedit of the INI file -- okay, I'm making that up, but it's a convoluted set of hoops for something that should be a simple dialogue box. Trying to move the folders to the D: drive, as one site suggested, left Thunderbird drooling like the victim of a 72-hourBeavis and Butthead marathon.
Finally, I went with Thunderbird Portable, a version designed to run off a thumb drive or other portable media. It's self-contained, so it doesn't treat a permanently-installed drive as any different from a removable drive.
Unfortunately, that doesn't mean it's stable.
The crux of the matter is that there's something about Thunderbird that destabilizes my whole system. At first, I was opening it up and leaving it running in the background, checking for mail every few minutes. My system started acting erratically, hanging up for a few seconds at a time, and taking an unusually long time to perform simple functions like switching from window to window**.
The temperature readout on the front of my computer told me that it was well past time to dust it out; when it starts pushing 100F, it starts acting glitchy, and with the central heater running this time of year, there's that much more dust and heat to worry about. So, a couple of cans of compressed air later, and a 113F operating temp was back down to a cool, happy 84F.
And the glitches kept on coming. I'd have to reboot every couple of days.
I'm still getting back in the habit of checking mail regularly, so I'd frequently go a day or two after a reboot without firing up Thunderbird. After about a week, it dawned on me... my system ran just fine until I opened up Thunderbird. It ran notoriously resource-heavy and buggy software like Second Life, it ran with heavy multi-tasking on two monitors, it ran as well or better than ever... until. I. Opened. Thunderbird.
I started changing variables. First, I changed the settings so that it wasn't checking mail every few minutes -- it only downloaded when I specifically told it to. That didn't help; the glitches continued until I rebooted.
I changed the way I used the program: instead of leaving it open and hitting the button to check mail periodically, I'd open it, read mail, and close it immediately. It didn't matter; the system continued to destablize even with it shut down.
I think Thunderbird has a serious memory leak, or something of that nature.
And I think that, ironically, it Doesn't Play Well With Firefox, particularly when Firefox is trying to interact with other software. My MUCK client, BeipMU, features clickable links. When my system is running smoothly, they pop up without a hitch. When there's some kind of glitch, they're the canary in the coal mine. This morning, I noted that the transition from "a little twitchy" to "completely unusable" didn't happen until I clicked on links in BeipMU to open them up in Firefox.
Thunderbird had, at that point, been closed between 8 and 12 hours.
Older versions of Second Life used to do the same thing. If I had SL, BeipMU, and Firefox open all at the same time (which I do regularly), clicking on a BeipMU link would slow the whole system down like the 880 at rush hour***. On the other claw, that would clear up once SL had been shut down for a while. This glitch requires a reboot every time I open Thunderbird.
And that does not facilitate my New Year's Resolution to keep caught up with my mail.
An important note: it's not just my system.
quelonzia reports that Thunderbird makes both her work and home systems unstable, too -- to the point of crashing, thanks to the heavy number crunching her accountantware does. However, she also says that this is a recent development; it may be something peculiar to the current version.So, I have a twofold question:
[Poll #904263]
* If I may digress, I don't consider spam filters to be a solution. When 80-90% of the global e-mail traffic comes from unsolicited advertisements, that's a burden on the entire infrastructure. Local filtering doesn't stop that, it only hides it. There's also the contiual problem of mail that you actually want getting caught in the filter. "Oh, just go through your junk folder before you delete it all!" Um, how is that helpful? I still have to pick through all the spam to find the stuff I want to read!
** Yes, I know that from a programming standpoint, task-switching is a complex, sophisticated function, but the OS is supposedly designed to handle them at a low level, so when they get glitchy, it's a Sign Something Is Wrong.
*** For those of you who don't live in the Bay Area, the the difference between the 880 at rush hour and a parking lot is that you have some hope of getting out of the parking lot.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-01-10 07:57 pm (UTC)Part of this reliance on off-system mail comes from my travels and/or the net-butterfly tendancies I had in the early '00s. Basically when you're moving around a lot, 'netwise, it's handy to have the ability to drag your e-mail around with you no matter where you go. As a side effect that eliminates any potential client issues on the local system, save for what issues the browser brings (and they tend to bring a lot), but on the other hand the speed of such interfaces can get frustrating, especially over dialup. I'd go completely to the low-bandwidth option of the ssh/pine account but... Well, I don't have my own server for such and I'm not sure I have 100% trust the staff on the server I use.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-10 08:12 pm (UTC)I did try Eudora for a while (and set my mom up with that, as it was free, and back when I set it up, it was much more solid than the 0.4 version or whatever it was of Thunderbird that was available at the time) so that might be an option. I can't comment on any features it may or may not have, since I haven't used it in quite a while, but it seemed solid, and the free version had one little ad in the corner.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-10 08:21 pm (UTC)I also thought it might be a memory issue. It's happened to me both on my 5-year-old Win2K desktop, and my relatively new WinXP laptop, but both of them are running on 512 MB memory.
But I do have these problems where the system will come to a screaming halt and the hard drive light will just be paged while the machine thrashes for awhile. My Win2K box has gone into a lockdown for a couple of minutes while it thrashes before becoming responsive again. I haven't found a good solution and have just been living with it when my machine goes into lockdown like that.
I haven't come up with an alternative solution. Outlook is fine if you're doing e-mail through an Exchange server, but I haven't been too impressed when it comes to POP/IMAP accounts. I actually use both: Outlook for Exchange email, and Thunderbird for other accounts. It might be worth a try, though.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-10 08:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-10 08:59 pm (UTC)I did have some problems with Firefox in combination with some extensions (notably, GreaseMonkey and Platypus) but dumping those extensions solved the resource drain. Note that I have thirty two extensions installed with Firefox 1.5.0.9.
I typically go a week or more without reboots and usually have uTorrent going in the background as well as Trillian, Firefox, and Thunderbird at a minimum. I don't do Second Life. I use MuckClient when I bother to check the mucks, and fire up mIRC about once a month. Generally Semagic is idle in the system tray and most times WinAmp is running. Paint Shop Pro, VLC, and Media Player Classic are up occasionally and I've been bringing FileZilla up and down a lot while working on websites lately. Dreamweaver will bog things while starting but not enough to be annoying really.
Windows XP home with service pack 2, AVG with email scanning.
Maybe it's something like the old problem I had with Pegasus in the version 3 era, where there is some weird interaction with a driver (in that case it was a specific HP printer driver) that combined with Pegasus to suck your resources dry. And speaking of Pegasus, I dropped it in version 4 because I had to use secure connections to my server at the time and it would fail to download attachments without corruption 95% of the time and yet still delete the messages from the server. Hafoc never had that problem with it, but he then didn't have to use a secure connection to get his mail.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-10 09:52 pm (UTC)I picked "try some other client". I still read email at my primary account with Telnet off the shell account server of the ISP I've been with since 1995; and the comp sci professor I keep going back to also still reads his email with Telnet. My other major email account came with the webcomic's hosting and is readable by webmail. Local clients like Outlook and Thunderbird don't interest me because the whole point of having email on a worldwide network is so you can read it from anywhere in the world.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-11 12:09 am (UTC)Outlook: Been using it since around 2000 (after switching from Netscape) and have never gotten a virus via email. However, I have also been running it with email-virus scanners the entire time. They've picked up on a handful of email viruses along the way, but none have gotten through. I've been using AVG Anti-Virus for a few years because the price is right and the protection seems at least as ironclad as pay anti-virus software.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-11 03:24 am (UTC)