Thunderbird 3 RC 1 Notes

Some gotchas upgrading from Thunderbird 2 to the release candidate 1 of version 3

Now that the first Release Candidate of Thunderbird 3 is out, and because I´m a glutton for new software versions I hazarded an upgrade to the new version. I love what I see so far, but there are a couple if bigtime gotchas that others might want to know about...

The new release is certainly faster, cleaner, and seems to have a lot fewer memory leaks, the upgrade was easy and probably will be painless for someone that has less ´invested´ data then I do. Just for some background I have every message sent or received (not including junk) since 1997 - or about 2.8 GB of email. This was split into just over 12 accounts and somewhere around 800 folders. So might be considered a bit of a stress test for any email client.

Everything was fine with the upgrade except...

First more background: One of the ways that I keep this vast amount of email organized is by having several dummy accounts for different email aliases that I use. For example Web@ is just a forward/alias to my info@ account but in Thunderbird 2 I had a separate "account" for web@ to keep the messages distinct. I have also never wanted to use IMAP because I want my email off the server ASAP (9000 messages a day tend to slow things down if they don´t get cleaned off pronto)

Unfortunately, during the upgrade all these "dummy" accounts were silently dropped (the data was still there on the disk but the accounts didn´t show in Thunderbird 3) This is a fairly significant issue and I have reported it to the developers. I was able to manually recreate the accounts, select the folder where the data still existed on the disk and access all my missing "stuff" but then I encountered another pair of problems. First the account was initially set to be IMAP and there seems absolutely no way to change it back to POP3 (still trying to research this one) and second, Thunderbird keeps trying to connect to the IMAP server (despite my telling it not to)

All in all I can work around these issues by changing my habits a bit, but for the sake of others trying to do the same upgrade I thought this experience was worthy of sharing.

---