[Discuss] Thunderbird continues on

[Darren Duncan]

Following up other posts on this subject ...

Thunderbird continues to be maintained, both with security/bug fixes and with 
new features, although the latter come out less frequently and batched up 
relative to Firefox.

I am now using the latest stable-for-awhile Thunderbird, version 31.7.0, having 
just updated to it today from 31.3.0 which came out in December.

A few weeks ago, the subsequent 'stable' version 38.0.1 (there was no 38.0) came 
out, which adds a bunch of new features, and I will probably update to it in a 
couple months after it had more time to shake out or had more point releases.

I have a large mail archive and tend to make a backup of my local Thunderbird 
data folder before I upgrade it, just in case.

Out of all the 38.x features I see on 
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/38.0.1/releasenotes/ probably the one 
that looks most attractive to me, in fact its a killer app feature, is "Allow 
file-per-message (maildir) local message storage (bug 845952)".  Previously and 
for a long time, one of the reasons I was doing some work to split kept mail 
messages over multiple mailboxes was to isolate or reduce the corruption risk, 
since each mailbox was stored in a single file.  This forward-thinking change 
removes a lot of management need and risk.

As a side-effect hopefully that will resolve, or make it easier to resolve, a 
significant bug I noticed in 31.3.0 versus the previous major version, where 
mailbox searches turned up messages not containing the search terms or possibly 
missing messages containing them, which looks like an off-by-one type bug. 
Compacting mailbox files after moving positive matches out causes the improper 
messages to not show up either.  I didn't see if 31.7.0 has that problem yet.

-- Darren Duncan