Monat: Januar 2009

This will be in english, because I don’t think the developers of postbox speak german 🙂

Link: Postbox

**First Startup

On the first startup, postbox asked me to create an account. This procedure was the same as in Thunderbird. With the same annoying circumstance, that I’m not able to enable SSL/TLS on account creation. I had to do that afterwards via the account settings.

The second annoying thing (which Thunderbird hast as well) is the automatic creation of a „Trash“-Folder. This is kind of useless to me, because my folder is called „Gelöscht“. But, here comes the best part: in postbox you can change it without fiddling around in the about:config thingy.

One good thing is, that postbox uses an index for all its stuff. The bad thing about is, that you have to index everything at first. That took for my 13000~ email roughly 2 hours (Intel P4 3.2Ghz). But why is it indexing the junk folder? Doesn’t make any sense to me.

Annoyingly, at each startup it keeps asking me multiple times for my password. One time is ok, because I don’t save my password, but one should be enough. And, because I have to accounts, those password input fields try to steal each others focus, and it all gets flickerish.

**Addressbook

The bad things I’ve discovered here, are due to the nature of postbox. It’s thunderbird beneath, so there is no VCARD support. But the most annoying thing was the fact, that the addressbook treats email addresses case sensitiv. So a „foobar@example.org“ is a different address as „FooBar@Example.Org“. But it’s not. It’s the same. So this nice view of all the people involved in a e-mail (The „To“ or „CC“-Part) doesn’t recognize an entry in your addressbook, because of the case sensitivity.

**E-Mails

There is this topic-feature. I don’t really know what’s it really for, but it looks kind of usefull. Except that you can’t „mass topic“. So you need to assign one mail after another to the topic you want.

And: No Views? On Thunderbird I have a view for my Junk-Folder which is basically „NOT marked as Junk OR new“, so that I don’t have to see all that garbage I’ve already marked as junk. This isn’t possible in postbox.

And I would really like to see how big my attachment is, when I write an email. There is an extension „Attachment Size“ which does that, but: no extensions :/

And a _really_ good thing is that shortcut to every link/image inside an email on the right side of it. LOVELY.

**These thingies on the top right

A really cool thing are those „Attachement“/“Images“/“Contacts“ and „Links“ thingies on the top. They basically strip everything else away. So if you click on „Images“, you will see all images that you have in the selected folder. Awesome.

But (isn’t there always a but), I would prefer, that if I’m in the „normal“ mode and currently in some sub-imap-folder and I click on that Images button, I want all the images of that selected folder, not of all my e-mail. After switching to that Images tab, I can select the right folder, but that seems an unnessecary step.

**Imap

I don’t really know why this is the standard behaviour, but, I want that every subfolder of my IMAP account is checked for new mail. Nowadays you can sort your emails serverside, so INBOX isn’t really the inbox any more. I can turn that on via about:config, but …

**Extensions

What? No extensions? I need my lightning-calendar :/

**Folders

So, I have a structure like this on one of my accounts:

INBOX
SORTED
    FOOBAR
        YEAH
    BARFOO

I’m currently in „YEAH“ and then I switch to my other account. Switch back again, and the folder view is collapsed to the layer with „FOOBAR“ and „BARFOO“. Annoying.

**Search
Lovely. Cause it’s all indexed it’s very fast. But one strange thing happened: Someone wrote to a mailinglist and quoted someone else (which hadn’t wrote to that list). So postbox shows that quote in a very nice colored box (I LOVE that). BUT: With the searchbox I wasn’t able to search for text inside that quote, only inside the „real“ email.

**Conversation
I like that. It’s the next generation threaded view. Perfect. Very good job on that.

**Overall
The seperation of accounts and their folders is _very_ good. I like that.

So, after some days of testing, it’s a stable beta 🙂 hope to see the final soon.