Mozilla Moves Thunderbird to Rapid Release Cycle

I use thunderbird, it's pretty solid, but I think outlook still has it's number, especially in terms of calendar, features , pure e-mail, it's very good.

Rapid release of what, honestly. No major features, that's what.

I am a long time TB user.
3 months ago I got a new laptop at the office and Outlook (2007) was there: I thought I'd give it a try, since the last time I had touched it was probably no less than 10 years ago.
I'm afraid it still sucks. I have nearly one hundred filter/rules, then I check the emails with the web interface, and the only way I have to have the filters applies is to select every single one by hand.
And this is a software designed in 2007? The n-th version of MS email client?
Who writes this code? And who tests it?
You have flashy ribbons, but the fundamentals of writing, reading, replying to emails are still as crappy as 10 years ago.
So I moved back to TB and I think it'll be another 10 years before I look at Outlook again.

This said, I wish that Mozilla had a nice overview of the features to be expected in the next revisions. "New awesomeness" tells me little, and FF6 had little over FF5, as much as TB6 had little over TB5.
I understand the fast release cycle, but releasing a new version just for the fun of watching the version number increasing every 6 weeks, doesn't really interest me that much.

Really, this category was over engineered a decade ago, no one is expecting too many developments.

Having said that, I do use TB and I have to say it p*sses me off to no end that when I click into the list of email headers and hit a letter (as you might do when you are sorting alphabetically in a field) it doesn't go to the letter you press because of all these keyboard shortcuts that don't require the pressing of alt or ctrl. WTF is up with that? (I'm ready to stand corrected if someone can tell me what I'm doing wrong)

Hi Jaksun5, that functionality (jump to letter) is just not supported in Thunderbird.
That is exactly how Outllok works, so if you think you really need it, you may want to try it.
I personally find TB's implementation a lot handier and faster: you have a quick-filter bar that is always visible: just type the letter(s) of the sender/recipient/subject/body that you're looking for, and get the results immediately.
Why do I prefer it to Outlook: 2 reasons:
a) In outlook you first need to filter by ... (e.g.: name) and then type the letter. I usually have the emails sorted by date, so I need to change the sort order, type the letter, then once I'm done I need to change the order again (which I usually forget, so if a new mail comes in the folder where I'm searching, I always scroll up/down, then realize that the new email is somewhere in the middle and re-order based on date)
b) Outlook has a search bar too but it always searches everywhere. This means that searches are slow, and you have no way to limit them to, for example only the subjects, or the addresses. So you can't find anything that way unless you enter a whole word, or even a short sentence.

But to answer your questions, you're not doing anything wrong.
If you want to disable the one-letter shortcuts (or change them to a multi-letter shortcut), you can install "Nostalgy": it allows you to change exactly that (as well as adding a few nifty features).
If you do that, you may even want to try the "Scroll to key" add on (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/scroll-to-key/).
This does not work with TB3 and newer, exactly because of the single-letter shortcuts.
I have not tried it, but you might be able to get it to work exactly the way you like it.

Thanks mate, I'll give it a go. I use Outlook at work and TB at home on Ubuntu, and to be honest it's a bit of a joke that anyone would spend any money on Outlook to use at home where typically there's no exchange server when there are dozens of free alternatives (although it could be argued it's 'free' with Office). Apart from that one issue I've found TB to be fantastic, esp considering the fact that it is portable between Windows and Linux, that fact alone is gold for someone who uses both OSes