History shows again and again how e-mail clients point up the folly of men.
I've finally gotten sufficiently fed up with Outlook Express to seek out an alternative e-mail client. The thing about bad software, however, is that if you live with a piece of software long enough, you get so used to its quirks that it's hard to adapt to a new program with new quirks. I've fiddled around with several different e-mail clients over the last few days: Pegasus, Eudora, Thunderbird, etc. All fine programs in their own ways, but none of them seemed quite suited to my way of working. I finally bit the bullet and chose to try living with Mozilla for a while, for web browsing as well as e-mail.
I realize that the stand-alone Thunderbird client is essentially the same as the e-mail component of Mozilla, without the overhead of the full application suite. However, there were a couple of minor issues that convinced me that the integrated client has a slightly more mature user interface. It's not that big a deal either way; if I decide in time to switch to T-bird, migrating mail and settings is supposed to be realively painless. The biggest initial annoyance coming from the Outlook Express world was the way Mozilla / Thunderbird split each e-mail account into its own set of folders (inbox, trash, etc.). However, in conjunction with using POPFile (which I decided to reinstall and retrain, for my own reasons), I can filter everything into a set of common folders the way I'm used to.
I've also tried out the Mozilla web browser from time to time, but the releases I've played with before never seemed entirely satisfying to me. From what I've done so far, the latest release is starting to feel like a comfortable fit. Again, there were just a couple of minor user interface issues that made me choose the integrated browser over the stand-alone Firebird Firefox. I haven't run into too many problems yet with problem pages in Mozilla, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time before I encounter a dreaded "Your browser is not supported" page. I have run into a couple of sites that look fine in Microsoft Internet Explorer but break down under Mozilla, but I see no sense in making too big a fuss until I can offer some concrete suggestions to improve compatibility.
Really, I guess I'll have to live with these programs for a time to determine whether I become comfortable with them. I'll try to remember to post some longer-term impressions somewhere down the line.
