I saw the news item that Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 had been released into the wild. I think Thunderbird is a great application, and I’ve been using it at home for a while now. I installed whatever version was current when the new laptop was purchased, and hadn’t upgraded since, because I didn’t see any compelling reason to.

So, I upgraded.

Whoops. Apparently after the upgrade, my pop3 server connection no longer worked. I couldn’t get mail. I could send mail, and I could see all of my old mail, but trying to get new mail just timed out. They have mail/settings importers built into it for Outlook, Eudora, etc. etc. etc. but can’t seem to import prior versions properly. After browsing the “support” forums, and being unsurprised at the surly attitudes of people “helping” others out, I downloaded an older version, uninstalled 1.0 and everything is working fine again.

Now, support isn’t fun, and it isn’t easy, but basically telling anyone who’s having a problem that they’re an idiot instead of asking for more information is a pretty stupid approach to take. Seeing a question like “I upgraded from 0.8 to 1.0 and now Thunderbird won’t download mail from my pop3 account” responded to by “you probably typed your password wrong” is just plain silly.

Buried in the avalanche of unhelpfulness, I did find one post that at least gave me hope, it had advice for how to turn on logging. I did that, and got a message about a timeout, but I didn’t have time to follow up on it. I’ll have to try again once things have settled down from the move and Christmas and stuff.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Hey German boy, go back to Germania!” - Nelzon Muntz