thunderbird

after reading mark pilgrim’s post about software choices (as well as some recommendations from others), i decided to give thunderbird 0.6 a go on my powerbook. i already use IMAP for all of my mail, so i regularly switch between clients when moving between platforms. however, my ideal would be to have a cross-platform set of tools that i can use. i already use gnu emacs on osx and linux and recently started using firefox exclusively. so far i feel pretty good about the switch. the things i really like so far are:

• message labels. i've already started to use 'important' and 'todo' extensively, and being able to quickly limit my view to all 'todo' messages is great.
• next unread. i can't believe mail.app doesn't do this... but it doesn't. hitting 'n' to go between messages is almost as easy as mutt ;)
• signatures from file. this is a big advantage over most gui mail clients, since i keep my config files typically in cvs, i can then keep my .sig there as well and thunderbird will always use the current one.
• offline ldap. i haven't used it yet, but i'm _totally_ gonna set up an ldap address book again now just to use it (syncing ldap for on the road with the powerbook would rock

i can also honestly say, i don’t have any real complaints yet. it’s not quite as snappy as mail.app on osx, and there have been a couple odd crashes, but otherwise pretty impressive for a 0.6 version. if you move between operating systems, i’d recommend it.