In the last batch of security updates, there was an update for Thunderbird. I haven’t been using Thunderbird since Intrepid Ibex came out, because Thunderbird has had some perennial problems with certain e-mail accounts and the version of Evolution bundled with Ibex works completely smoothly. Nevertheless, I decided to see if the security update of Thunderbird had improved anything.
I was having the same old problems with my school e-mail account. Just to be thorough, I checked my Thunderbird server settings on that account with the same settings in Evolution. I discovered that I hadn’t set Thunderbird to use SSL on the account, so I held out hope that my problem might be remedied. Unfortunately, now the school’s mail server gives me an “authentication failed” error when it tries to read the mail on that account.
Now, to be fair, this problem may be caused by the software the school is using for its e-mail servers (and web portal). They’ve had tons of technical problems since switching to this particular program. However, Evolution has no problems interacting with it. So the lesson here is that Evolution is much better than the better-known Thunderbird at dealing with obscure, wonky mail server software. Furthermore, Thunderbird probably isn’t going to get much better, since it’s now a volunteer project with no official support from the Mozilla Foundation. Besides, Evolution comes already installed on Ubuntu, so you don’t even have to be lazy enough to download the package.
Dances With Ubuntu 