SeaMonkey vs. Thunderbird

I prefer T-Bird over the rest. How about uninstalling TBird, then reinstalling and let it grab its settings from SeaMonkey.

Why not get a proper newsreader, such as Agent? ...Jim Thompson

Hey, even though Thunderbird can do news reading, I suppose, I use a proper newsreader, from Newsguy.com. Thunderbird is for official 300 work emails/day. Plus Yahoo and Gmail.

Have you tried SeaMonkey? I don't know if T-bird will import settings from SeaMonkey, do you? I also don't know if it will work any better than it did before. I've put off switching for sometime. T-bird has been a PITA for months because it has delays for not apparent reason.

This is a known problem. Thunderbird does sorts on the messages in memory, and with large newsgroups, that can overflow and cause thrashing to disk. For that reason, I switched to knode for newsgroups. I still use Thunderbird for email, it works fine for that.

Jon

The funny thing is when I see T-bird freeze up I don't see any abnormal activity either on the disk, CPU or networking. I would expect this to show up on resource monitor.

I am seeing small delays in SeaMonkey. But with T-bird it would freeze for so long I would go play Sudoku or go get something to drink.

OK, I only know the Linux version, which could behave differently. I moved my newreading off of T-bird quite a few years ago, so I don't recall if it caused heavy disk I/O or not. But, it would cause complete lockup of T-bird for several minutes. The cause was a really active newsgroup, which my news service kept files back to 1990 or so, so there were several hundred K of message headers to sort through. There was supposed to be a time horizon for newsgroups, but possibly once all those ancient messages had been loaded, it would not get rid of them, only reject loading any fresh messages older than the horizon. I guess I could have unsubscribed and deleted the folder and re-subscribed. Anyway, the problem is solved by using knode for news and T-bird for email, and I'm happy. knode is very similar to T-bird, I'm guessing it may have derived from Mozilla/T-bird as some point.

Oh, yeah, the T-bird lockups were really long.

Jon

Select 'View' at the top, then 'Zoom'. I use the 240% setting on a

That changes the font size in exactly one pane.

SeaMonkey is every bit as bad a piece of software as T-bird. It seems to have the same delay problems (although not quite as bad) and has many other problems as well. I did manage to find a support group, but there isn't much help there. Seems like some people have problems with SeaMonkey/T-bird and others don't.

Big deal. How much time do you spend, on the others? You can always change the screen's resolution. I prefer the older Netscape 4.78, but it won't install on this 64 bit Win 7 Pro system.

Too much because they are hard to read.

I know. I set the resolution so the rest of the computer is usable and now only the apps that ignore the Windows settings are hard to read. In particular there are icons in SeaMonkey that are *very* hard to distinguish because of their size.

Some people complain software won't run on old machines. Some people complain software won't run on new machines. Some people complain because the software just won't run. Damn computers...

I've used SeaMonkey exclusively since Netscape went away. In addition to a browser, email, & news reader, it also has a built-in WYSIWYG HTML editor. It also stores individual email folders as pairs of files instead of a huge database.

You can easily customize just about any part of SeaMonkey by using "Theme Font & Size Changer". This plug-in fixed a problem with getting the right size fonts for various SeaMonkey screens (mail, browser, etc.) without doing the massive changes created by Windows display size changes. Very few problems compared to many other browsers and readers. It simply works!

Bert

I started with a very early version of Netscape, on my first Win 95 computer, almost 20 years ago. I used it on 95, 98, ME, NT4, Vista and XP.

... and in a standard format (mbox) that can be read by other email clients. Rather useful if SeaMonkey/Thunderbird/X/Y goes titsup.

I was with you until you said that. The real problem with SeaMonkey is that it doesn't fix the problems I had with T-bird. The delays in running are a bit better, but it has other problems I never saw in T-bird. I can be typing a message and the program freezes (as it often does for some seconds) but sometimes when it comes back the focus changes to the main window and the keystrokes cause all sorts of trouble! Just one of many problems I never saw with T-bird.

Internally it is mostly the same software.

Originally there was Netscape, a combined program with a web browser, e-mail client and HTML editor, then it was renamed to Mozilla, somebody decided that it grew too large and ripped the web browser out of it to be released as a separate program: Firefox. At that time, people who wanted to continue to use the same e-mail client ripped that out as well: Thunderbird. The HTML editor wasn't successfully released as an independent program. The original combined program then was renamed Mozilla Seamonkey.

Development continued and large modules of software (especially the internals, a bit less the user interface appearance) were repeatedly backported from Firefox and Thunderbird back into Seamonkey.

So it is not at all surprising that you see similar behavior between those. Also not that they can use eachothers config files and even mailstore.