Wishlist for Thunderbird... please email me with responses/flames etc...

Hi everyone,

I am a recent convert so to speak from MS Outlook to Thunderbird 0.9. It 
took me forever and a day to migrate each of my individual folders and 
messages from Outlook over to Thunderbird and I am still paying the 
price now because it looks like my Outlook.PST files were too difficult 
for Thunderbird to handle. Because of this, I have some questions and 
hope someone has some answers.

I would also if possible greatly appreciate it if someone sends me an 
e-Mail with the answers because chances are I won't be able to find this 
again and hope someone can give me some insight...

1. For some reason when I try to import folders that are really deep 
from Outook to Thunderbird, the system chokes saying that it is unable 
to create those folders. Is there a character limit to the string that 
was used to define the folder name or names... For example:

I had a folder in Outlook that said: foo>foo1>foo2>foo3>foo4>foo5 with 
some subfolders along the way in foo2 (say foo2.1), foo3 (foo3.1) and 
foo4 (foo4.1) with some sub-sub fodlers in foo2 (foo2.1.1). and so on. 
(Yes I like to keep things granular). When I try to import all five of 
these folders and their related children, the system balks or hangs 
saying that I cannot create foo2.1, foo3.1, foo4.1 and 2.1.1 without it 
choking if I go much deeper than this.  Some names can be longer than 
others and some may have spaces in their names... is there a problem 
with this?

2. Much simpler question: Why can't Mozilla Thunderbird support the 
ability to dump more than one item with the same name in the trash? When 
I tried to import files from Outlook to Mozilla for some reason I 
managed to get a ton of duplicates and when I tried to remove them, the 
system said that there was a file with that name in the trash and could 
not delete it. This is crazy because I need to be able to delete tons of 
duplicates?

3. Speaking of duplicates, I want to be able to go into a folder and 
delete duplicate messages. When I went into Mozilla after trying to dump 
some files from Outlook, I ended up making duplicates and sometimes 
triplicates of the same file! What can I do to delete those files?

4. Is there any way that you can have a 1:1 relationship between e-Mail 
accounts their POP account and their SMTP account? I have at least two 
e-Mail accounts where I am dumping files and I want to be able to have 
the system intelligently use the right SMTP server for each account so - 
if I send mail from foo.com and bar.net, and the SMTP servers 
stmp.foo.com and smtp bar.net instead of having to manually switch 
between the two servers...

5. Is there a way that the system can highlight what mail came from what 
provider by color coding mail from say foo.com in some arbitrary color 
and bar.net in another one?

6. The rules engine needs to be able to give the user the ability to 
dynamically create a new folder if a folder was not there before and not 
rely on the user to click "New Folder" first and then find the parent 
where it will be held. This also can be done so much nicer in a tree 
format for you to pick the right folder instead of having to go through 
an infinite number of drop downs to find your right folder.


7. Is there a way to import/export only certain folders instead of 
everything? Also, if you want to backup everything to install again on 
another machine, how do you do this without losing everything (I have 
10s of thousands of emails that I keep for a variety of reasons and I 
can't afford to drop them).

8. When you migrate from Outlook to Thunderbird certain HTML messages 
get corrupted so all you have left is a bunch of stripped text and a 
useless message without any HTML. The system will take new messages 
successfully but cannot interpret the migrated messages at all - any 
idea why?

I have other requests but these are the big ones I have now... any help 
in these would be greatly appreciated.

If this also does not fit in this newsgroup, please let me know where to 
post this request list - in e-Mail please!

Thanks in advance.

Jeff Schaffzin