Thunderbird - not meeting expectations...

I saw a fair bit of criticism in MagNet and MicroNet for Eudora and much
praise for Thunderbird. When I changed jobs/depts a month ago I thought
that would be a good time to switch (Win XP Eudora to Mac OS 10.4
Thunderbird).

Here's what I found that doesn't meet my expectation for the Thunderbird
mail client. I'll share this with the folks at Thunderbird, but I'm
curious if I just don't know how to use the app. Some are
minor/personal prefs, some basic functionality.

    * No keystroke for Send mail
    * No keystroke for Check Mail
    * (For Mac Client) Cmd+Option+M for new message - come on!!! There
      are some combos that should be considered a basic part of the user
      experience. Cmd+N isn't even used for something else...
    * For just one PI that I support, /any/ attachments come in
      requiring me to run through Stuffit (/This file must be converted
      with BinHex 4.0/ - may be a problem with that PIs attach/encode
      option) but this never happened with Eudora.
    * I recently sent a pdf to list of invitees and learned that several
      Mac users received the attachment inline in the email, not as a
      pdf (I see that sometimes) but as inline text of course with odd
      coding/formatting looking rather unprofessional. (from a Mac to a
      Mac, with extension showing, etc). i don't see any options to
      change how outgoing attachments are encoded - there were options
      in Eudora, though I didn't always know why to choose which.
    * I can't schedule an email to be sent at a later time/date (less
      important in this job than the previous one).
    * It doesn't spell check the subject line.
    * I can't set filter on "Sent" messages, only incoming.
    * I'm not yet SURE (there /has/ to be, I keep saying to myself) but
      I'm basically convinced that there isn't a way to automatically
      download any attachments I receive. It seems that I need to
      double-click the attachment to get it downloaded. I want to be
      able to return to an email whose attachment I didn't need two
      weeks/months ago and use the attachment now even though the email
      may have been deleted from the server. I can see that this may be
      a security "feature" - preventing autodownload of malicious
      attachments. But I'll let Symantec do that for me. I'm sure
      there will also be those who point to using IMAP as a solution.
      Less of an issue for me now, but in the past folks regularly were
      sending me large files and that made IMAP impractical for me - and
      I know that there are campus solutions for team work on shared
      files, though I'm not sure how that works when interacting with
      non-employees/non-CalNet folks.

 If enough of these can be solved just with more info about the app,
great! I appreciate your knowledgeable suggestions,
Michael

-- 
Michael Rimar
Administrative Director
Center for Integrative Genomics
MCB 142 LSA #3200
Berkeley, CA 94720-3200
510-642-7327
510-643-5785 Fax
http://cigbrowser.berkeley.edu
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