Yes, I really liked it. I’ve always been waiting for any updates or new tools, which feel the same way or look as nicely as M2 did, or for a Linux port of M2. I use Windoof rarely these days and would have liked M2 on Linux.
Let me list some pros and cons of M2:
Pros:
- The User Interface looked really good. In my opinion Thunderbird still doesn’t really look as good as M2 did back then. When you used labels, you could use favicons of websites for those labels, so that you could immediately recognize where that e-mail came from.
- Labels. These little bayesian filter controlled labels were really useful and for a long time I missed such a self learning thing in Thunderbird, until I recently found out about TaQuilla, which offers the same functionality in Thunderbird for tags. It learns which e-mails are tagged with a specific tag and it works well, but there is one thing missing: Little icons you could specify for each label. At least I can get my mails sorted in a comfortable way now, using TaQuilla and so called “Saved Searches”, which sort by tags.
- The speed. I never had any experiences of it starting slowly.
Cons:
- No support for OpenPGP. This is a major issue. I have one friend with whom I write encrypted mails and I don’t want to use 2 separate e-mail clients for writing with that friend and all the other people I write e-mails with. Support which Enigmail offers on Thunderbird is a must have for any modern e-mail client.
- If I remember correctly, sometimes the HTML content of e-mails wasn’t displayed correctly. Most of the time it was though. It probably had to do with M2 not being further developed.
- No Linux version. I am almost exclusively using Linux these days, so if there is no Linux version of it, I can’t use it. Thunderbird is available on every major platform.
- No calendar. I’ve been using Thunderbird for a long time now and I got used to having the calendar in my e-mail application. I don’t want an extra application for my calendar and I don’t want to have it online, visible to Google and all its friends. I like that I can simply choose to not connect a calendar with any e-mail account in Thunderbird.
I often compared to Thunderbird. I don’t consider software like Outlook to be comparable to Thunderbird. Not having proper OpenPGP support is a killer already. In fact, when I tried to setup my e-mail accounts in Outlook, I had nothing but trouble and it wouldn’t let me continue, even if the login or connection to a server entered during setup failed, like Thunderbird would let me. Imagine the case that you’re not 100% sure about the correct settings and you want to come back and fix them later on. You can’t do so in Outlook, because you’d have to start all over again. Not so in Thunderbird. To me it seems Outlook is simply inferior in many ways and I won’t even consider using it, even if it was available on Linux (it isn’t, is it?). I’ve also tried some other e-mail clients, which had a 30-day-free version, but they also didn’t offer OpenPGP support, so they’re not worth the money.
