[Johnny Brown]

having become a bit of a firefox evangelist I thought i'd try Thunderbird.
About a month down the line and I have yet to see any advantages and to be frank its pissing me off, slower and more cumbersome than outlook.
I presume this is due to my driving rather than the program, can anyone give any tips/ opinions?
Top of the list would be how to make it easier to enter my website address when composing, at present I type nearly three times what I used to...

[butters]

If I am reading right here you want something to make typing in www.johnny-brown.com or something along those lines - try https://addons.mozilla.org/thunderbird/578/ - it's primary use is to add signatures to the bottom of mails and forum posts but it should be capable of doing what you need. I will have a better search later and see if there is something better if that is no good.

bluebrad

[Johnny Brown]

Thanks for that, but it looks rather longwinded whereas outlook just recognises urls as you type them.
If no one is going to tell me its a great program I think I'll ditch it. I've yet to find any advantages.

[Palomides]

The biggest advantage I've found over Outlook is how it does storage of mail.

In the past I've lost a lot of mail when the huge Outlook .pst files have become corrupt. Thunderbird spreads stuff out more so that it's easier to restore or migrate mail/addresses/settings.

.. but having said that I'd recommend making sure that your regular backups include the prefs.js file, as if this becomes corrupted it's a real pain having to recreate all your profile settings.

The thing that annoys me the most is trying to customise it. Your example of converting URLs to hyperlinks is a good one. There's always this nagging feeling that there's a simple configuration flag or option or extension to enable what you want to do. But finding it is such a pain in the arse (if it exists at all)..

[squeek]

http://email.about.com/od/mozillathunderbirdtips/qt/et101805.htm

Seems to say thunderbird automatically makes your URLs and emails into links when you send an html email.

[Johnny Brown]

Hmm, it'd be nice to see that it has done without waiting for a reply though...