Thunderbird 3, Beta 2.

At home and at work, I use Thunderbird. I like the having a nice, lightweight, open-source mail client that doesn't try to do everything (like Outlook tries).


However, over the last year, I have become extremely frustrated with Thunderbird for two major reasons:

1. There is a bug that causes the password to be forgotten for IMAP accounts. The end-result is that you have to needlessly type in your password.
2. IMAP mailbox performance just sucks.

Since I use IMAP for both my home and work e-mail, this was getting a bit unbearable (as well as my wife complaining about these two issues also... and rightfully so - this was just getting miserable).


I normally do not go out of my way to try beta software (since I run my computer at home like a production system... it's all about productivity and not having applications crash all of the time). However, I decided to download and try out Thunderbird 3, Beta 2.


And it is fantastic.


The password bug is fixed; I originally downloaded the beta because I saw in Mozilla's bug tracker that the issue had been resolved in the beta. Even, better the IMAP mailbox performance is much better. Thunderbird now locally caches mail in the background. Even better you can enable/disable this feature at a folder level. Since disk space is cheap, I take the default options which cache everything.


I have not had any stability issues or crashes since downloading it last week. If you are a Thunderbird user who uses IMAP a lot, download the beta now!