When Did Thunderbird’s Account Setup Become a Pile of Poo?

      by Wyatt Walter

It really is a sad day. I used to think of the main Mozilla projects, Firefox and Thunderbird, the pinnacle of open source. I’ve always recommended Thunderbird as a mail client to those who prefer not to use the web client available from their provider. I was extremely disappointed today when I had to help someone setup an email account on a server that didn’t use their domain name as part of the hostname of the mail server. I see what they are trying to do (and indeed, it made setting up my email account using mail.whatan00b.com as the server incredibly simple), but if one has to not use fairly predictable settings, said one is hosed.

The below screenshot is of the server info as detected by Thunderbird when I put my email address in:

Note that the outgoing mail server is a drop-down.. populated from.. where, exactly? Now, I realize that you can just go ahead and create the account and go back, but one can’t create the account without “re-testing” (validating) the config. So.. it has to be correct before creating it, but yet it won’t let me correct it. Yup, it’s that awesome.

Next, changing the protocol in the drop-down didn’t change the port number. When Thunderbird didn’t find the correct mail server (which is going to be the case almost every time when one’s email is hosted in a shared, hosted environment), Thunderbird automatically populated the protocol with POP. Not a horrible thing, but changing the port when changing the protocol seems like a pretty obvious thing to do in order to avoid frustration with users (and indeed would have helped with some frustration for us tonight).

The last frustration that we ran into was that when selecting the “Manual Setup” option, things weren’t quite so.. er.. manual. It was more like some automatic settings that couldn’t be overridden after clicking the manual frustration button. Since it defaulted to POP when it couldn’t figure out the server settings, simply hitting the manual setup button created a POP account.. Not so bad if you could easily switch the protocol. Of course, not so. To get that corrected, one has to remove the account, create a new account, type in your name and login info, let it try to figure out the settings for you, manually edit the settings to change the protocol, and create the account by hitting the “manual setup” button (intuitive, eh?). Then, you can finally edit the server name to put in the correct info. Ugh.

At the end of it all, I would still recommend Thunderbird to others from a usability perspective, but now with the disclaimer that it’s nasty to setup the first time if you don’t use a mail.domain.com or similar server. I just really wish that we didn’t have to sacrifice power and easy customizations for alleged ease of use.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Dec 29th, 2009