In my quest for the ultimate email, rss, and newsreader I’m giving Thunderbird 3.0b2 a try. Check out this post for a few more details. So far, decent for email, decent for news, but it’s weak for rss.
First, read these two tutorials:
- Tutorial for setting up Thunderbird
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Lifehacker suggestions for Thunderbird and Gamil. This is probably the most complete summary I’ve seen. Additionally, it includes this very informative table that maps what an IMAP client does (i.e. Thunderbird, Mail.app, iPhone) to how that’s interpreted by Gmail:
Then, you ned to figure out keyboard shortcuts
If you are curious about how messages get retrieved, check out this tidbit on IMAP and the “IDLE” command from Entire message fetched when opening a IMAP message:
mail.imap.fetch_by_chunks controls whether Thunderbird tries to fetch a message body (or any other MIME body part) in chunks. mail.imap.chunk_size controls the size of the chunk. It currently defaults to 10240 bytes. If you set the chunk size too big, it defeats any attempt to fetch just the message body. One problem with enabling fetching by chunks is it breaks the optimizations built into the TCP/IP protocols, and adds extra overhead as each chunk has to be acknowledged. If tweaking the “MIME Parts On Demand” preferences doesn’t help, or if it works but you get poor performance, try disabling fetching by chunks.
Pete Ware 