So, this afternoon Mike mentioned trying Thunderbird as a one-stop solution for both email and RSS feeds, which sounded kind of interesting. It would have to be VERY good to get us to switch from using the native Mail.app plus the standalone NetNewsWire. Mail is no great mail client, but it wins by being completely integrated with the Apple Address Book, which in turn syncs seamlessly with the Treo; there’s no way we’re going back to multiple address lists. NNW, on the other hand, is legitimately excellent. Still, always intrigued by the prospect of new software — and free software at that — we downloaded T-bird to give it a look-see.

A very brief look-see, as it turns out. We can’t seem to make T-bird arrange itself in a way that doesn’t look like ass and waste acres of space; even its version of the layout we use in both Mail and NNW wastes so much space it’s useless to us. Mail.app and NNW aren’t free or Free, so we’d like to find alternatives, but at the end of the day we also can’t backtrack on functionality or interface. T-bird loses on both counts.

Of course, if we were like Mike, we’d still be reading email in emacs, so we expect T-bird will frustrate him for wholly different reasons. Heh.