[tilwidnk]

I want Thunderbird to look like Thunderbird, not Outlook. There's nothing superior about Outlook. When Microsoft made the ridiculous decision to stuck the search text box in the Title Bar, it was clear they have no clue any more what they're doing. Then Thunderbird recently followed suit. Dumb and dumber. At least TB lets us fix it. Now they're focusing on Exchange support when the best email servers on the planet have nothing to do with Microsoft? Dumb and dumber redux. Time to look for a new email client on the Linux Desktop.

[tomsmeding]

I get your sentiment, and while some may disagree (most of this is subjective, anyway), there will be many who agree with most of your points here. However:

> Now they're focusing on Exchange support when the best email servers on the planet have nothing to do with Microsoft?

People don't want Exchange because they like Exchange. For people who like Microsoft, the very last thing they care about is that their email client communicates with their server over Exchange.

This feature is for the unfortunate Linux fans, like you, who are stuck with a job that requires them to interact with a Microsoft server. That's not dumb, that's a smart move on the TB side (well, lucky, perhaps, that people are willing to work on it, more than being smart) to allow users to use TB in the first place. If you don't use Exchange you won't mind the support (barring perhaps reduced development elsewhere), but it will let many people use TB where they otherwise _could not_ without plugins.

[jraph]

> Now they're focusing on Exchange support when the best email servers on the planet have nothing to do with Microsoft?

Well, I guess lack of exchange support in Thunderbird might blog migrations to Thunderbird / Linux on the desktop in places using Exchange.

If users are already using Thunderbird, switching from Exchange to a regular mail server might be more easy: the UI doesn't change.

(now, I don't see many places using Exchange switching to Thunderbird, but that certainly opens a migration path)

[SV_BubbleTime]

>now, I don't see many places using Exchange switching to Thunderbird,

Because you couldn’t.

There was a TB extension “OWL” but it wasn’t good enough for me, still lacked things like the contact cards with data from your Active Directory install, and other default Outlook features.

So the point for me is now you could take that path - maybe.