If you read the post (which was written in early 2005), it’s clear I wasn’t happy with Norton either, and I never wrote that the problem was totally Thunderbird’s fault.

But there are plenty of things that are Thunderbird and the Mozilla Organization’s fault. That the description of Thunderbird (at that time) clearly stated it was designed to stop viruses and malware in the Inbox: who’s fault? That there is no built-in or official anti-virus system: who’s fault? That there was no good documentation for this topic: who’s fault?

Open Source developers all too often take the attitude that if it is possible to resolve the issue in the software, then any issues are the fault of the user, not the software, no matter how hard it is for normal people to actually resolve the issue. And, as Nuzman does above, they express that blame quite strongly, in a way that will turn most people off. No wonder Thunderbird doesn’t have the market share that even Firefox does.

Remember the old Avis (rental car) commercials? “We’re #2, so we try harder.” Thunderbird isn’t even #2 in the email client space. How much harder should it be trying?

As a network admin who spends a fair bit of his life removing, no, wrenching, one particular piece of so called “network security” bloatware from malfunctioning windows boxes, I say clamwin and thunderbird, AVG and thunderbird, F-secure etc etc etc all play nice.

Trapper is right. You are wrong. However the Open source community needs to spend more time addressing the needs of windoze users for spoon feeding. Open Source stuff like mozilla products, clamwin and so forth, need to do what they say on the tin without ANY knowledge on the part of the installer.

The problem arises when the approach is geekstreet: absolutely plain vanilla install and then add a whole bunch of increasingly esoteric add-ons to gain full functionality.

It mayhaps needs to be, instead, main street: absolutely every option on install, and the option to sqwark to a help desk to reduce these if required.

Cheers.

If your antivirus program doesn’t have a function to scan email as it’s downloaded and prior to hitting your inbox, get a real antivirus solution that does.

Let’s not be bad mouthing Thunderbird for something you are not doing appropriately in the situation you have.

It is important for developers, especially in this crucial stage of adoption/transition, to “make it work” for the end user. Just don’t let it get out of hand. MS, as much as it pains me to say, knew this and did it very well. They just don’t know when to quit, ie has anything from MS ever been ‘final’?

Second, I’ve been using AVG and Thunderbird very well together for a couple of years with no problems such as losing inboxes. However from time to time the email scanner sets itself (or is set by something else) to “not fully functional” and Thunderbird cannot retrieve messages from the server. It seems to want to ignore my ADSL modem and tries to open a dial-up connection that I have installed for those times when I’m on the road and need to use an ordinary phone line. After hours of trying to sort this out I’m not much wiser. The browser connection works fine.

BTW AVG and Avast! both work seamlessly for pop3 and imap mail with Thunderbird, Pooka, Columba, Opera, Outlook, and Outlook Express. It’s not difficult to work with Thunderbird, – these two companies did it easily enough. Avast! intelligently knows about Mozilla mailboxes, and can scan and clean individual messages within them.

If you are a pop3 user you could also try clammail (search sourceforge for it), which works nicely with Thunderbird, if you want to be completely open-source…

@Justin: Doesn’t the free edition of AVG add a little advertisement to the bottom of your email messages? A friend of mine (who uses Eudora with AVG) has stuff like this at the bottom of her messages:

-- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.308 / Virus Database: 266.8.1 - Release Date: 3/23/2005

To me, that’s completely unacceptable. I see enough advertising already, and I am actively trying to get it out of my life, not add more into it.