Thunderbird Usability – almost enough to make me try evolution

This one is whiprush inspired.

I’ve been using Thunderbird primarily and continuously for 18 months and off and on since much its inception. I’ve obviously thought it great since January of 2004, since that is when I made it my primary mail application.

I’ve just run into something that it cannot do. My sister-in-law mailed me pictures of her kids and I cannot “save all attachments”. Why is there no ability to save all the attachments with one command? Worse yet, I can’t even tell there are attachments. The message is being displayed inline and the images are just inline. The only way for me to save the images are to right click each one and click “save image as…”. How does that make my life easier? Where is the inovation? How does it scale? (I know for sure that it doesn’t scale.)

I think I shall try evolution… Maybe in 18 months, I will have a status report. Stay tuned until December of 2006.

Update:

Wow, both schweeb (via IM) and whiprush (via comments) replied very quick to point out that if I switch message viewing mode to plain text (View->Message Body As->Plain Text) then I will get the attachments toolbar and I can right click a message and “Save All”.

Thanks guys.

I’m still complaining about usability, but at least what I wanted to do is possible.