Jaropa Tech Limited
Mozilla Thunderbird 3
Firstly, let's make it clear that Jaropa Tech Ltd still likes the Thunderbird email client. It has an excellent record
of being easy to set up, easy to use, and unobtrusive in how it gets on with its job of handling your emails.
But it is rather puzzling to see what Mozilla has done in version 3. They have taken something that works, and upgraded it in a way
that has clearly angered a lot of people. So what have they done?
They've introduced a new Mail Account Setup Wizard that means, according to the Mozilla website that you don't need to
know your IMAP, SMTP, SSL/TLS settings. You just need your name, email address,
and password for the wizard to find and set the email settings for you.
Except that it doesn't always get it right.
The problem is that the wizard thinks it knows best, there is no obvious choice to set up your account manually, and if Thunderbird
finds that both IMAP and POP3 access is available, it uses IMAP. Even if you're using POP3.
Searching forums for comments yields many results. Here are a few:
- "I've been using Thunderbird for years. Never had so much trouble as I am having attempting to setup ver. 3."
- "Too much trouble. I am now using Eudora"
- "Thanks to wonderful auto-setup it automatically set itself up to IMAP and syncronisation."
- "...since when did POP3 get so demoted in favour of IMAP?"
- "stupid automatic mail set-up nonsense, I just want to add an account manually but it insists on choosing IMAP not POP3."
Now, it is possible to set up Thunderbird 3 to use POP3, but it's not obvious how and this is where the problem lies.
Once you've entered your name, email address, and password, clicking 'continue' causes Thunderbird to
go online and work out your settings for you. Unless you are lucky, you then have to edit the settings yourself to make it work! Alternatively,
after clicking 'continue', you can click on 'stop' and as long as you've got in quickly enough, you will have prevented Thunderbird 3
from doing its automatic stuff. You can then enter the settings manually. However, we've even witnessed Thunderbird changing it back
from POP3 to IMAP for no reason that we could fathom.
It would appear that, in an attempt to make things easier, Thunderbird 3 has made it harder, and alienated many faithful followers in
the process. For years, Microsoft appear to have invested heavily in 'new features' instead of fixing existing bugs. Mozilla
should not be tempted to do the same.
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