Thunderbird glitch

[Peter in New Zealand]

Thunderbird is a superb email client - no doubt about that. But there is
just one thing that stops me from adopting it. I know that many people
find it ideal for their needs, and I agree, with one horrible exception.
My purpose in posting this here is to see if anyone else has experienced
this issue. The address book is flakey! It's fine until a few groups are
created, and then, when attempting to populate those groups, whether by
drag & drop from the main listing, or by manually typing them in, the
whole thing becomes unreliable. Some addresses simply won't appear in the
group no matter how many times you try. Often when you close the address
book and reopen it you discover entries in a group that have not been put
there, apparently picked up somehow at random from the main listing. I
the problem seems (I think) to focus around entries without an email
address, so I tried putting a dummy one in those ones. That seemed to
help a little, but before long it was back to its old tricks.

Now, as I said, it is a great email client, but this flakeyness in the
address book is fatal for me, and so I cannot migrate to it. Otherwise I
love the program. Has anyone else found this to be an issue? I am asking
here in the first instance because I know the regulars here are
discerning and very clued up people - far more so than me, and I would
like to get your perspective on this. Incidently I have encountered this
issue for the last several builds. If no one can come up with a thought
here I will try the Mozilla forums.

Thank you for reading this, and for any thoughts you may care to offer.

Peter in New Zealand.

 

[Richard Steinfeld]

Thunderbird is a superb email client - no doubt about that. But there is
just one thing that stops me from adopting it. I know that many people
find it ideal for their needs, and I agree, with one horrible exception.
My purpose in posting this here is to see if anyone else has experienced
this issue. The address book is flakey! It's fine until a few groups are
created, and then, when attempting to populate those groups, whether by
drag & drop from the main listing, or by manually typing them in, the
whole thing becomes unreliable. Some addresses simply won't appear in the
group no matter how many times you try. Often when you close the address
book and reopen it you discover entries in a group that have not been put
there, apparently picked up somehow at random from the main listing. I
the problem seems (I think) to focus around entries without an email
address, so I tried putting a dummy one in those ones. That seemed to
help a little, but before long it was back to its old tricks.

Now, as I said, it is a great email client, but this flakeyness in the
address book is fatal for me, and so I cannot migrate to it. Otherwise I
love the program. Has anyone else found this to be an issue? I am asking
here in the first instance because I know the regulars here are
discerning and very clued up people - far more so than me, and I would
like to get your perspective on this. Incidently I have encountered this
issue for the last several builds. If no one can come up with a thought
here I will try the Mozilla forums.

Thank you for reading this, and for any thoughts you may care to offer.

Peter in New Zealand.

Peter,
What version of Thunderbird are you running?
What's your operating system?

I've experienced broken data that I've traced to aggressive running of
background processes from security programs such as Sygate Firewall, and
Avast Antivirus, especially together; Grisoft AVG antivirus was by far
not as intrusive, but I believe that it may have had something to do
with trashed inbox email files in both Outlook Express and Thunderbird.
I'm not completely certain that this was the cause. My system is Windows ME.

But yes, I do recommend a Mozilla forum. Hmm. I didn't know there were
any on the newsgroups. I'll look.

Richard in California

 

[wald]

<snip>

Have you searched Bugzilla to see if somebody already reported this?
It might clear some things up.

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/

Regards,
wald

 

[Vic Dura]

Thunderbird is a superb email client - no doubt about that. But there is
just one thing that stops me from adopting it. I know that many people
find it ideal for their needs, and I agree, with one horrible exception.
My purpose in posting this here is to see if anyone else has experienced
this issue. The address book is flakey!

That is so the Tbird address book will be compatible with the useless
bookmarks manager in Fbird.

 

[Peter in New Zealand]

Thunderbird is a superb email client - no doubt about that. But there is
just one thing that stops me from adopting it. I know that many people
find it ideal for their needs, and I agree, with one horrible exception.
My purpose in posting this here is to see if anyone else has experienced
this issue. The address book is flakey! It's fine until a few groups are
created, and then, when attempting to populate those groups, whether by
drag & drop from the main listing, or by manually typing them in, the
whole thing becomes unreliable. Some addresses simply won't appear in the
group no matter how many times you try. Often when you close the address
book and reopen it you discover entries in a group that have not been put
there, apparently picked up somehow at random from the main listing. I
the problem seems (I think) to focus around entries without an email
address, so I tried putting a dummy one in those ones. That seemed to
help a little, but before long it was back to its old tricks.

Now, as I said, it is a great email client, but this flakeyness in the
address book is fatal for me, and so I cannot migrate to it. Otherwise I
love the program. Has anyone else found this to be an issue? I am asking
here in the first instance because I know the regulars here are
discerning and very clued up people - far more so than me, and I would
like to get your perspective on this. Incidently I have encountered this
issue for the last several builds. If no one can come up with a thought
here I will try the Mozilla forums.

Thank you for reading this, and for any thoughts you may care to offer.

Peter in New Zealand.

Thank you folks for taking a moment to think about this and offer your
thoughts. I tried searching Bugzilla for "address book" and got no hits
whatsoever. (Might be me - I'm rather a beginner at all this.) Anyway, I'll
try over there and see if I get any help. If so I'll report back here.
Thanks heaps guys.

Peter in New Zealand

 

[wald]

Hi Peter,

Thank you folks for taking a moment to think about this and
offer your thoughts. I tried searching Bugzilla for "address
book" and got no hits whatsoever. (Might be me - I'm rather a
beginner at all this.)

I did a quick lookup and came up with a bunch of seemingly related
bugs:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=282841
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=250394
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=272823

Maybe there's something useful there...

Regards,
Wald

 

[Peter in New Zealand]

Ahhh. Knew my fruitless search had to be me. Thank you for that. The two of
those that seem to describe the issue I have are dated last Dec and Jan
respectively, so I guess it is still in the system. It's a real shame,
because as an email client TB is absolutely first class. Unfortunately I
find that many good clients seem to suffer from a less than adequate address
book - Becky is a classic example. The best address book I've ever found in
an email client is the one in The Bat!, but I am aware that is shareware and
therefore OT. Anyway, thanks for your help. It's good to know the issue is
in the system. I will keep an eye out, and maybe someone will correct this
and make TB into the best client - period. Unfortunately I have not the
expertise to tackle it myself.

 

[Michael Salem]

If you need MAPI support for receiving mail, a lot of programs don't
have it. Pegasus doesn't, and I think Thunderbird didn't when I last
looked. Can be useful to be able to use your mail program to integrate
with other processes. Outlook Express is included-free-with-OS-ware that
supports MAPI. Sometimes worth living with its vulnerability to attack
for this.