I've been using Thunderbird again recently because Outlook 2010 wasn't able to connect to the company's Exchange server (although I guess Office365 with OWA might be something different? Maybe Exchange in the cloud? I didn't track things down too far... Outlook, even after updating with a download that the OWA interface said I needed, didn't work), but somehow Thunderbird with the ExQuilla extension ($10 a year) does. Go figure.

I don't hate Thunderbird, but I can see why folks aren't drawn to it. It's very Netscape 3.0-ish and its interface is, at times, horribly unintuitive. It's got *everything*, but everything isn't particularly accessible. I can't imagine if I was coming into Thunderbird cold and hadn't used since, well, early Netscape.

Here's an example.

If you want to set the display font for "plain text" emails in Thunderbird, you have to go to Tools >>> Options, Display, Formatting, click the Advanced button, then click the Monospace drop-down and select a font and size. But I kept getting what many of what were obviously plain text emails in a much larger font than what I'd set.

Turns out that the "Fonts for [Western]" drop-down at the top of the Advanced fonts interface only works for ASCII (I'm assuming) emails. If you want plain text emails in UTF-8 to have a different font than the default as well, you have to choose "Fonts for [Unicode]" from that drop-down. This bugzilla thread helped. Not sure why there's a distinction. Perhaps other languages have different fonts for different 7-bit encodings? But shouldn't there just be a concept of a "default" display?

So right. Guess I should've figured that out. /sigh Why you can't just right-click the message you're looking at and set your font (for the whole app) there, I don't know.

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