Microsoft Outlook to Mozilla Thunderbird: RSS Frustration And Information Simplification

My initial attempts to transition from Microsoft Outlook to Mozilla Thunderbird last week were thwarted by misbehaving software, although I eventually figured out a workaround which got the migration rolling again. Yet my problems with the program continued, albeit not with their prior degree of severity.

As I first mentioned last Thursday morning, Thunderbird’s RSS capabilities seem to be half-baked at the moment. Specifically, I initially had difficulty importing the OPML file of my subscriptions from Google Reader, and I’ve subsequently experienced corruption of the feeds and their settings. After a random period of post-import time, the names of some feeds (particularly those containing extended characters such as ":" and "|") get mangled, some feeds’ settings become inaccessible, and some feeds stop updating.

On a hunch, Saturday morning I whittled down my Google Reader feed count from over 200 to 127, a subscription-culling operation that was long overdue anyway from an overall information-inflow sanity standpoint, then re-imported the OPML into Thunderbird. Everything’s been stable the last 48 hours, so I’m hopeful I’ve just stumbled across (and surmounted) an undocumented RSS feed count limitation. If need be, I can further cull my subscription count below 100; I’ll report back if my current RSS situation remains wonky.

The nexus of my Thunderbird data set is a substantive Outlook database that dates back to 1997. It contains hundreds (thousands?) of folders housing thousands (tens of thousands?) of emails, an elaborate folder tree that I continue to use to archive and organize messages for future online and print writeups. Outlook made it easy to move messages from one folder (such as Inbox or RSS) to another via the Move To Folder toolbar icon, which provided a drop-down list of the last ten destination folders in addition to the more general Move To Folder function. Thunderbird conceptually supports similar capabilities, via the Move To function accessed through a mouse right-click after selecting a message. And the subsequently offered Recent option provides a 15-item list supposedly of the…err…15 most recently accessed folders.

But when Move To->Recent works, it does so in a more literal fashion than I’d prefer; it offers the 15 most recently accessed folders, not the 15 most recent destination folders, which isn’t terribly useful for someone like me who now has 127 RSS subscription folders. And anyway, the Recent list doesn’t always dynamically update as it should; sometimes it seems to get ’stuck’ at a particular folder list image until I quit and restart Thunderbird. I’ve dodged the issue by means of the Nostalgy add-on, which provides keyboard shortcuts for going-to, saving-to, and copying-to-folder functions and then offers a drop-down box of folder name candidates that narrows down as you type more characters of the desired folder’s name.

Other program grumbles are far less severe. For example, Thunderbird v3 adds built-in address book interoperability with Mac OS X’s Address Book, which longtime readers know I’ve got synchronized both with Address Books on other Apple hardware I own and with Google’s Contacts, via a combination of MobileMe and Spanning Sync. However, Thunderbird’s Address Book database is less featured than that of OS 10.5, offering (among other shortcomings) only two email address entries. As such, it presents me with only two email address options for my contacts with more extensive email address lists, and I’m unable to choose which two I’m offered. I was more than a bit irritated when, after deleting the initial IMAP account for Gmail that I’d set up (in favor of its POP3 successor), I discovered that the ~1 GByte folder-and-file structure for that account was still sitting on my hard drive. And Thunderbird seems to stubbornly resist my attempts to persuade it to retain folder viewing settings (message sort categories and orders, message characteristics categories and their sequence, etc) other than the defaults.

But there’s a lot to like about Thunderbird, such as its built-in image attachment viewing and web browsing capabilities, and let’s not forget that it’s also a native OS X application (with profile-compatible Linux and Windows options, as well, in case I switch operating system allegiances in the future). As such, I no longer have to deal with the notable performance drag and substantial system resource consumption (particularly important with this limited-memory and -CPU horsepower MacBook Air) of VMware Fusion virtualization of Outlook 2000 running on Windows XP. I love the resultant noticeably speedier system responsiveness, along with no longer hearing that constant system fan whine!

To wit, I’ve got Fusion shut down right now and am curious to see how long I’ll be able to sustain a Mac OS X-only operating scenario. For example, I’m writing this particular blog post in OpenOffice; the only issues I’ve encountered so far are that embedded weblinks don’t survive import into my blog publishing tool and I therefore have to manually re-enter them, and that paragraph tags (<p> and </p>) become less format-desirable breaks (<br> and <br />) necessitating that I manually edit them in the HTML source code prior to pressing ‘publish’. These quirks are likely due to OpenOffice’s native ODL format versus my blog tool’s Word format assumption, and if they get too annoying, I may need to break down and somewhat redundantly also install Office 2008 for Mac. But it’s conceivable that in the future, the only time I might need to fire up VMware Fusion is when I need to access an ActiveX-requiring website in Internet Explorer. Stay tuned…

p.s…for those of you who might be wondering why I’m spending such a notable amount of time and cyber-ink covering this particular topic, my motivation is two-fold. First off, I assume that at least some of you might be personally interested in following in my open-source footsteps, either individually or with respect to your business’s default software suite. And perhaps more importantly, I professionally always keep in mind the fiscal and flexibility appeals (along with the potential functionality and vulnerability downsides) of open-source operating system and application code for your future design projects. It’s why, for example, I keep a close eye on the Mozilla Foundation’s Fennec, a mobile-tuned version of the Firefox browser. Presumably, Mozilla also aspires to sooner-or-later migrate Thunderbird into handsets, too.

p.p.s…and for any OpenOffice developers that may be reading this, right-click quick access to the thesaurus in Writer (thereby mimicking this feature found in Word) and other OpenOffice suite apps would be greatly appreciated!