SIgh. I've used thunderbird for years, even before it was thunderbird, netscape mail.
It seems that developers for thunderbird and all other mozilla projects are hell bent on: 1) Adding as many features as possible, especially if their utility is questionable. 2) Making sure that the keybindings are always always always "microsoft" and can never ever be set back to "emacs" bindings. There have been many methods over the years to change the keybindings but they eventually don't work with distro-x,y or z and or get deprecated and/or don't work with every part of the emailer -- title bar, text area etc. I've tried them all. I may give up. Ironically the MAC version leaves these as emacs bindings. I guess all those ex-unix guys are mac guys now. Yeesh. 3) Make extra damn sure that the UNIX versions (et al) all have incredible stupid behaviors that can not be fixed. Like for instance, attachment handling. Now, I of course have mplayer, which can play wmv files. I'd like thunderbird to use mplayer to play WMV files. So, when you download an attachment, you can specify the player. And you can do it again next time as well because thunderbird can't remember it. There's a little checkbox to "always do this action" but IT'S ALWAYS GREYED OUT. I filled a bug against tbird years ago on this and have been, of course, summarily ignored. I've been told that all software projects are like this -- programmers don't want to fix the bugs they created yesterday, they're too busy writing new bugs. So while writing this I tried evolution. It handles the attachments a little better. It has some other annoyances that maybe I'll live with. I'll try it and if it works, thunderbird is going to fly away. -- Gerry Lawrence gwlp...@gmail.com (408) 255-2413
