Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind

Why I Won’t Be Trying Thunderbird 3

(or how I learned to stop wor­ry­ing and love Apple Mail)

Yesterday saw the release of Thunderbird 3 (UK-specific link), the first major update to Mozilla’s email applic­a­tion in nearly three years. I’ve been a staunch sup­porter of Firefox, their flag­ship web browser, since it was first released in 2004. Thunderbird and I, by con­trast, have enjoyed only the briefest of rela­tion­ships (a fling some­time dur­ing the sum­mer of 2005), so I thought I’d explore why this is, and why — sadly — I don’t feel at all com­pelled to give its latest ver­sion a try.

In my exper­i­ence as a long-time medium-to-heavy email user, I’ve found that — some­what like web browsers — the choice of email cli­ent is heav­ily influ­enced by one’s envir­on­ment. Working in a Windows envir­on­ment as a home user sev­eral years ago, I star­ted out with Outlook Express, then gradu­ated to Outlook once I star­ted using cal­en­dar, notes and con­tacts func­tions. When Thunderbird came out, I switched to that (I can remem­ber the delight­fully simple import pro­cess — a high point), and was impressed by fea­tures like the plu­gin archi­tec­ture that made integ­ra­tion with anti-spam and encryp­tion products a cinch. Unfortunately I bought a PocketPC soon after­ward, and once I dis­covered the impossib­il­ity of syncing it with Thunderbird, I switched back to Outlook.

More recently as a user in an enter­prise envir­on­ment, the intro­duc­tion of Exchange meant a man­dated use of Outlook. Before Exchange came to the com­pany I was using a mix­ture of Zimbra web­mail and Outlook, but a pat­tern was begin­ning to emerge — I was essen­tially happy with whatever products I happened to have access to. This con­tin­ued when I bought my first Mac about a year ago; abandon­ing a Windows PC and Outlook for a MacBook Pro, I switched my POP accounts to IMAP and moved all my mail to Apple Mail. I now use an iPhone 3G when I’m out and about, and the syncing between that and Apple Mail plus the highly cap­able email func­tion­al­ity of the iPhone itself mean that I’m a pretty sat­is­fied user.

And here’s the thing: when it comes to email cli­ents, altern­at­ives to the stand­ard on your plat­form of choice are usu­ally pretty hit-and-miss. In most cases there aren’t many altern­at­ives, and where they do exist, they’re often awful. In OS X, if you don’t want to use Apple Mail, you’ve got what — Entourage? Please. Entourage is where notions of good applic­a­tion design go to die. Outlook might take flak on top­ics such as mail­store integ­rity (and rightly so) and oth­ers, but all in all it’s a great applic­a­tion, espe­cially in enter­prise envir­on­ments. Thunderbird is pretty much the only viable altern­at­ive to Outlook or Outlook Express in Windows (dis­count­ing ancient his­tory like Lotus Notes, sorry), and it’s just not that dif­fer­ent.

And that’s pretty much the core of my argu­ment — it’s the same on the Mac: Thunderbird is great, but it just doesn’t have any dif­fer­en­ti­at­ors that really grab me in any mean­ing­ful way. By and large, any main­stream email cli­ent will do 95% of the things I need it to do on a reg­u­lar basis — and I’d like to think that I rep­res­ent the major­ity pro­file for the email user. My anti-spam/AV is car­ried out server-side; I now don’t use encryp­tion often enough to move away from manual encryption/decryption with a third-party applic­a­tion; I track a reas­on­able num­ber of cal­en­dar appoint­ments and con­tacts; and I use notes on occa­sion. I’m not that spe­cial, really. And I can, there­fore, be happy with just about any cli­ent offer­ing. I could switch entirely to Gmail tomor­row, but I just don’t need to.

Thunderbird’s new fea­tures include tabbed view, improved search­ing, plu­gin archi­tec­ture and vari­ous other odd­ments. While I’m sure tabs bring some­thing to the email table, I’m really not sure they’ll have quite the impact they did when they first arrived in web browsers. I rarely have to deal with more than two sim­ul­tan­eously open email mes­sages, and when I do I can man­age just fine with them arranged as sep­ar­ate win­dows on my desktop. Likewise I access up to four mail­boxes sim­ul­tan­eously most of the time and can cope quite cap­ably with hav­ing them access­ible from a side­bar or folder tree. As for search­ing, Apple Mail’s search isn’t great, but in 99% of cases I can quite hap­pily loc­ate the mes­sage I need in a few seconds. Improved search would be nice, but — like the other new fea­tures — lack­ing it really doesn’t feel so bad.

The Register ran an art­icle earlier in the week on Mozilla’s plans to revive a “stag­nant” email cli­ent scene, and this is a word that sums up the situ­ation pretty well. I’ve drawn par­al­lels with web browsers here but they are curs­ory to say the least — the email cli­ent scene bears little resemb­lance to the excit­ing skir­mishes of the “browser war”, not least because in Internet Explorer we have a product with a huge install base that con­sist­ently fails to live up to the agreed expect­a­tions of what con­sti­tutes a good web browser. Email isn’t really like that, because for most people any­thing will do. This is as much a product of the nature of email itself rather than the ten­ets of any par­tic­u­lar stock email cli­ent — be it Outlook, Windows Mail, Apple Mail, KMail or whatever — email is simple, on the whole, there­fore cli­ents are also simple. And it’s going to take sig­ni­fic­ant change in email itself before we start look­ing around for new cli­ents with revolu­tion­ary new fea­tures to really rev up our own email experience.