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A few months ago I changed over to a Linux desktop at work. Because we have exchange I using evolution. Sadly, it's at best a weak replacement for a mail client. Its local message store is barely functional and falls apart horribly with sizes resembling anything that any real user will have.

So, a little while ago, our exchange admins turned on IMAP, I switched to Thunderbird and things were better. Or so I thought. It turns out that, except for Bayesian spam filtering, Thunderbird is just an outlook replacement.

What? Isn't that what I wanted?

No. I want it to be better. Why should I have the exact same capabilities when I can have more?

My current problems are focused around message filtering. Apparently there's a number of things that Thunderbird just doesn't do quite right. Like the fact that it only filters on the Inbox. So, if you're doing serverside filtering before downloading mail you can't re-filter on the client. That just seems silly.

But, the part where it could really be improved is in the general handling of filters. Thunderbird is built on the standard mozilla engine. So, it provides a nice javascript-y programming interface. How hard would it be to add capabilities like regular expressions or the ability have it actually execute code on particular messages? And there aren't even plug ins that do that.

Sure, I could write one, but, if I had the time to do that I wouldn't need the capabilities it would provide.

And that's one of the catch-22's of open source.