Been using Thunderbird for several months. Long post ahead, read at your own peril, I swear, there is a question at the end.
What a horrible program. I can't remember any program, on any platform, crashing this much. The symptoms of each crash are the same - endless spinning beach ball of death, fans heat up, TBird won't respond, have to force quit. The causes are varied:
The Totally Random Crash (TRC) - any time, for no apparent reason. Always happens when I'm out of the room. Come back in, no more email. About once every 2 weeks.
The Flaky Saved Search (FSS) - FSS's seem to be more common when the folder being searched is large. In every case, the saved search will work for a while, and suddenly crash. After that, the FSS will produce the same crash every time. Deleting the FSS and creating an identical replacement still causes a crash. Frequency: about 10% of saved searches.
The Killer Email Tag (KET) - Similar to the FSS. An email tag will work for a while, but then will cause a crash when attempting to tag a particular message. Once a tag has become a KET, it will crash the program anytime it is used on any message. Deleting the KET and creating a new tag of the same name doesn't work; the new tag is instantly a KET, rendering that particular word anathema forever. The original errant message that transformed the tag into a KET had been tagged successfully in the past. Following the initial KET genesis, tagging the errant message with any other tag results in the instant creation of another KET. I know have 5 or 6 words that I can NEVER use as tags (yes, it took me that long to learn).
Ok, rant over. Is this just me? Has anyone else experienced the FSS or KET phenomenon? Anyone had luck making Thunderbird not suck? I'm required to use Thunderbird for my work email, but I might switch back to Mail for personal email. I'd rather keep everything in one client though, so any suggestions would be most welcome.
And to address the one that I know is coming - yes, I could delete my profile and see if that helps. But that would be a ton of work, especially getting email tags back (since Thunderbird doesn't pull them out of messages, I'd have to reenter them manually for them to show up in my old mail). I only want to do that if it's likely to work.
What a horrible program. I can't remember any program, on any platform, crashing this much. The symptoms of each crash are the same - endless spinning beach ball of death, fans heat up, TBird won't respond, have to force quit. The causes are varied:
The Totally Random Crash (TRC) - any time, for no apparent reason. Always happens when I'm out of the room. Come back in, no more email. About once every 2 weeks.
The Flaky Saved Search (FSS) - FSS's seem to be more common when the folder being searched is large. In every case, the saved search will work for a while, and suddenly crash. After that, the FSS will produce the same crash every time. Deleting the FSS and creating an identical replacement still causes a crash. Frequency: about 10% of saved searches.
The Killer Email Tag (KET) - Similar to the FSS. An email tag will work for a while, but then will cause a crash when attempting to tag a particular message. Once a tag has become a KET, it will crash the program anytime it is used on any message. Deleting the KET and creating a new tag of the same name doesn't work; the new tag is instantly a KET, rendering that particular word anathema forever. The original errant message that transformed the tag into a KET had been tagged successfully in the past. Following the initial KET genesis, tagging the errant message with any other tag results in the instant creation of another KET. I know have 5 or 6 words that I can NEVER use as tags (yes, it took me that long to learn).
Ok, rant over. Is this just me? Has anyone else experienced the FSS or KET phenomenon? Anyone had luck making Thunderbird not suck? I'm required to use Thunderbird for my work email, but I might switch back to Mail for personal email. I'd rather keep everything in one client though, so any suggestions would be most welcome.
And to address the one that I know is coming - yes, I could delete my profile and see if that helps. But that would be a ton of work, especially getting email tags back (since Thunderbird doesn't pull them out of messages, I'd have to reenter them manually for them to show up in my old mail). I only want to do that if it's likely to work.