Thunderbird, IMAP, and OPML
I’ve long complained about how lame Outlook is as an IMAP client. It’s truly sad that Microsoft has a great user experience in Outlook when used with an Exchange server, but point it at an IMAP server and it’s among the worst out there.
Every once in a while, I run a web search looking for better imap clients. I’ve used Outlook Express, which was way better, for a long time, but have been annoyed that it doesn’t support my preferred “deleted messages move to trash” mode instead of the standard IMAP “marked as deleted, expunge to really delete” mode.
This time, I came across a “great post by Omar Shahine”:http://blogs.msdn.com/omars/archive/2004/02/19/76061.aspx describing my gripes and talking about which readers work well. As a result, I’m now giving Thunderbird a test-drive.
Thunderbird also supports RSS reading, and if I’m giving up Outlook for IMAP reading, I’ll be giving up NewsGator as well. Sadly, it doesn’t support OPML import yet. Another quick search, though, finds lots of angst about that, as well as a “solution from Dougal Campbell”:http://dougal.gunters.org/blog/2005/01/17/improved-thunderbird-opml which works just as advertised.
Now if only Thunderbird supported calendaring. Oh, if only I were “using a Mac”:http://www.michaelmcdaniel.net/2005/03/28/mac-lust/ — I guess Entourage supports it quite well.