1) “Better” search. Do you really want to sit and wait for Mozilla to index all of your emails? The search is damn slow and opens up a new tab and is hard to sort. No thank you. To get the same quick search results as in Mozilla Thunderbird 2, I changed the search bar options in the upper right hand corner to do SUBJECT, TO, OR CC FILTER.

2) Indexing. The indexing just slow! Even when you go to Tools->Options->Advanced and uncheck the Global Search and Indexer, it’s still doing something in the background. I see that Thunderbird still wants to download my 200,000+ emails in the “All Mail” box. WHY!??!?

3) global-messages-db.sqlite. This file can get INFINITELY big as it is used for the indexing and searching, I believe. It is located in your Thunderbird profile folder. For Windows Vista/7 users, it should be under the folder C:\users\YourUserName\AppData\Thunderbird\Profiles\SomeUniqueRandomCharacters. As an individual user, you might not care about this file growing insanely large, but in an enterprise level these files will consume so much disk space. Mine was reaching over 200MB+ and growing. I just have to shut Thunderbird down and delete it. Disabling the Global Search and Indexer will stop this file from growing big after you shut down Thunderbird 3 and restart it, however, this is a PER USER option. Any other users logging in the same machine will have to do this themselves. What a pain!

4) So you’ve turned off the indexing and search, but your IMAP accounts are still going berzerk and downloading mail. What’s going on? Go to TOOLS -> ACCOUNT SETTINGS. Expand your mail account(s) and go to SYNCHRONIZATION AND STORAGE. You need to tell Thunderbird 3 to download messages from your IMAP server from the past X days. By default, it’s set to download all your IMAP emails locally to your computer. HORRIBLE IDEA! I changed mine to just 1 day(s). I don’t need my emails from 2001 locally on my computer. If I did, I would have chosen POP instead of IMAP!

In conclusion, once I realized the problems with Thunderbird 3, Thunderbird 3 became bearable to use. It’s just very annoying!!! I wish there were more mail clients around. I also don’t like Outlook, so what mail clients are left to use?