Switched To Thunderbird
- March 15, 2006
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My email inbox was beginning to get out of control the last few weeks. I would sometimes lose an important email or forget that certain emails needed a response or some kind of action.
A couple days ago, I noticed that there was an Intel version of MailTags available for download. It basically lets you assign keywords, notes, projects, etc. to your email. All of that metadata can be used by Mail’s smart folders and rules which makes it a really nice way to quickly scan through and organize your mail.
I installed it and immediately setup all my projects and keywords. When email arrived, I assigned it some keywords and threw it into either ‘Personal’ or ‘Work’. The smart folders scanned those folders and organized the email by keywords like ‘action’, ‘wait’, ‘respond’ and so on. It was a quick and easy way to plow through a lot of email. It worked like a charm for about a day, and then out of the blue Mail crashed on me. Hard. When I restarted it, all my preferences, including my new keywords, were screwed up. I tried recreating the keywords and assigning them again, and Mail crashed again. That last crash was a doozy because I lost quite a bit of mail. I tried rebuilding the mailboxes but it didn’t work. Mail had lost an email here or there every now and then before, but not huge chunks of mail like this.
So I decided to switch to something else. I ended up with Thunderbird mainly because there weren’t too many options on the Mac. I saw that there was an Intel build of it, so I decided to try it out.
The default Mac interface is a decent attempt at making it fit in with the whole Aqua scheme of OS X, but it’s pretty easy to tell it’s not a native app. Plus it has no built-in integration with OS X’s Address Book, which is a pretty big con. That looks like it will be changing soon though since someone has recently released a patch that has basic integration working. This means that future releases of Thunderbird will probably have this much needed functionality soon.
Another problem was that there was no obvious way to import my old mail from the latest version of Mail since Apple had recently changed the way it organized and stored email. Thunderbird is expecting mbox files, but Mail was using emlx files. After some searching, I found a thread on MozillaZine where someone had figured out a way to do it. It wasn’t very difficult, but tedious nonetheless. The free emlx to mbox converter utility from cosmicsoft was key. It took me about an hour to convert and then import all my mail after work this evening.
So now I had a Thunderbird loaded up and working pretty good, but I really missed the tagging/smart folder functionality I had with Mail. I did some more searching, and found a way to mimic that functionality at Entropic Principal. In a nutshell, you use Thunderbird’s labels and saved searches, which are essentially the same thing as Mail’s smart folders.
I again set up the ‘Personal’ and ‘Work’ folders for initial organization. Each label has a number keyboard shortcut so labelling emails is quick and easy. I can quickly scan through the emails, assigning the appropriate labels. I set up saved searches that will organize the mail by those labels. Each saved search will also show me an email’s source folder too, so it’s easy to see whether an item is for work or personal. If something’s really important, I’ll flag it for easier identification.
I’ve also setup a saved search that will show me any mail that is at least a week old. It’s to show me people I’ve been waiting on for either a response or some kind of information for a project.
This setup is working beautifully so far. I’m quite happy with it. Since I’m running an Intel-build of Thunderbird, everything is quite snappy. It feels faster than Mail actually. The only thing I’m missing still is the Address Book integration, but that will hopefully get solved soon.