--- 
layout: post
title: thunderbird
created: 1084323156
permalink: blog/walkah/thunderbird
tags: 
- geek
---
after reading <a href="http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/05/01/essentials">mark pilgrim's post</a> about software choices (as well as some recommendations from <a href="http://daemon.co.za/">others</a>), i decided to give <a href="http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/">thunderbird 0.6</a> a go on my powerbook. i already use IMAP for all of my mail, so i regularly switch between clients when moving between platforms. however, my ideal would be to have a cross-platform set of tools that i can use. i already use <a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/">gnu emacs</a> on osx and linux and recently started using <a href="http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/">firefox</a> exclusively. so far i feel pretty good about the switch. the things i really like so far are:
<ul>
<li>message labels. i've already started to use 'important' and 'todo' extensively, and being able to quickly limit my view to all 'todo' messages is great.</li>
<li>next unread. i can't believe mail.app doesn't do this... but it doesn't. hitting 'n' to go between messages is almost as easy as <a href="http://www.mutt.org/">mutt</a> ;) </li>
<li>signatures from file. this is a big advantage over most gui mail clients, since i keep my config files typically in <a href="http://cvs.walkah.net/">cvs</a>, i can then keep my .sig there as well and thunderbird will always use the current one.</li>
<li>offline ldap. i haven't used it yet, but i'm _totally_ gonna set up an ldap address book again now just to use it (syncing ldap for on the road with the powerbook would rock</li>
</ul>

i can also honestly say, i don't have any real complaints yet. it's not quite as snappy as mail.app on osx, and there have been a couple odd crashes, but otherwise pretty impressive for a 0.6 version. if you move between operating systems, i'd recommend it.