bastards!
Thunderbird: don't use it. My computer has been begging to be reformatted for a little while now, but that doesn't excuse a mail program throwing out all of your email. Oh, the big, mammoth files that used to contain them are still there, peeking out at me -- 100 megs of personal stuff, 150 of work -- but every single byte of them is set to 0x00.
Losing one mail file? I could forgive that. Shit happens. My hard drive might be to blame. But given that a) all of the files and directories surrounding this one are perfectly fine and b) both content files are hopelessly fucked, I am less inclined to be charitable.
I'm totally stumped as to why it's apparently so hard to write a decent email client. Filtering spam? That's tough. Rendering HTML? Hugely complicated. But those parts are already written -- they're the bits that actually work! The part that nobody can seem to master is efficiently and flexibly sorting, storing and displaying a lot of small text files. This is something that computers are well-suited to doing very very well. But for some reason, email clients can't quite manage it.
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Any time you have a large email store you run a serious risk of the files being corrupted, regardless of email client, especially if you regularly access the file. It's not just Thunderbird; it happens with Outlook and Outlook Express, too. It's all about archives, backups, and the delete button, amigo.
Yeah... I switched to TB after outlook express ate my mail; switched to OE after outlook killed my archives; I think I was using OE before that.
Its certainly true that they're all guilty. I do wonder about what their underlying engine is, though. Do these guys use a robust transactional database to handle messages? From the TB docs I've read, I doubt it.
You can argue that running an RDBS for an email client is overkill, but we've got a glut of desktop resources these days, and office apps aren't taking advantage of them. I'd love to see a badass memory hog email app that has mysql under the hood.
The thing I don't get is that "In The Beginning" mail was just text files (one big text file). The most obvious way to "scale" that is to divide up that big text file into numerous text files (one per message). That is just so simple, that it's no wonder Microsoft and Mozilla cannot seem to do it. Netscape Mail always sucked just slightly less than Outlook, but it was always crappy. Mail.app on OS X is pretty decent, but GMail is really the best mail reader I've used. Too bad you can't run it locally or install it on your own server...
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