Andrew Sutherland's dashboard

Hm. Not all of the mirrors must have that Thunderbird release available. The following specific server should hopefully work...
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.or...

I'm not sure what you are referring to when you say "copy the Thunderbird sub-folder in the profile folder". Do you mean backing it up?

In any event, to answer your question, yes, installing 2.0.0.23 will be safe and you will have all the data you had before. Just don't install it in the same directory you installed Thunderbird 3 (unless Thunderbird 3 has already been uninstalled).

Thunderbird stores messages in "mbox" file format which is a single file with all the messages stored one after the other. When a message gets marked deleted it is not immediately purged from the inbox. Instead, it is marked as deleted and will be purged on the next compaction pass. It is likely your inbox was never previously compacted and got near the maximum file size limit over time. By compacting the folder, you made the file small enough so that new messages could be added.

We are working to address this limitation of mbox storage and the need to compact by supporting pluggable message stores in the future.

Thunderbird 3 features a new global search capability that indexes your messages in the background. This can add some load to Thunderbird while it is performing the initial indexing, but should settle down once it completes. You can check what Thunderbird is up to by going to the "Tools" menu and selecting "Activity Manager". If Thunderbird is still busy indexing several days after indexing, there may be some greater problem going on, such as the auto-sync software constantly re-downloading messages it has already downloaded.

What does the activity manager say?

The old Thunderbird would actually have done the same thing on the Junk front as configured and with no spam history available to it. When the user has never flagged any messages as spam and new messages are received, bayesian classification is not performed. However, once at least one message has been marked, it tries to do its thing. It can and will get things wrong until sufficient training has occurred, which is unfortunate. This problem is mitigated by Thunderbird defaulting to not moving messages to the junk folder... the user usually ends up turning this on only later. This is obviously suboptimal but still the same as Thunderbird 2.

It sounds like you miss the 'quick search' functionality. In the search box on the toolbar, the icon of the magnifying glass with the down arrow is actually a means to change the mode of operation of the search box (as it was in Thunderbird 2 as well). If you click on the icon and select one of the filter options (any option but "Search all messages"), auto-complete stops showing up and filtering is performed as you type, as in Thunderbird 2.

It's concerning that any text input in Thunderbird would actually lose letters you type. Even if Thunderbird is being overtaxed, keyboard events should not be dropped on the floor. Are you using windows and does windows make a chiming sound when you type and characters are lost? For the characters to get lost, I would expect windows would be dropping events due to severe event queue backup, in which case it would make chiming sounds.

I'm going to mark this as answered as I think I addressed the non-rhetorical questions you raised. It sounds like you may also be hitting some bugs which should be tracked on separate getsatisfaction problems/questions rather than in a single large thread. Please try and see if there are existing problems/questions that describe the problems you are experiencing before creating new ones. Please also try and keep your tone a bit more civil.

This sounds like your problem is with Firefox, which has a 3.5.6 release, whereas Thunderbird does not.

You can find Firefox support here:
http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/

None of the mozilla-hosted installers (via http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/) should contain viruses; anti-virus software is run as part of the release process as I understand it. We do, however, constantly get tons of false positive reports. It is especially not surprising that an out-of-date virus checker would see a false positive.

Are you using POP for both accounts? (If you bring up "Account Settings" from either your Edit or Tools menu, depending on the platform, and click on "Server Type" under each account, it should indicate the account type.)

Something might be wrong with your address book. If you bring up the address book via the Tools menu's "Address Book" option, there should be a list of address books down the left side. Normally, after an upgrade, you should have "Personal Address Book" and "Collected Addresses" listed. Do you have these? Do you have more?

Thunderbird should work in Windows 7. Can you describe how it fails? Also, please make sure you are not installing over top of a Thunderbird 2.0 install; install Thunderbird in a new directory.

Does the problem happen if you run Thunderbird in safe mode?
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Safe_mode#L...

The most likely explanation is that an incompatible extension or theme is in use.

All of your data is still there. Your e-mail and address book are stored in the "profile" directory which is completely distinct from where the program is installed.

You can find the latest 2.0.x installer for en-US here if you uninstalled 2.0. Change the URL/browse around for other locales:
http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/thund...

Yes! In the thread pane, if you look at the row of columns, you will find that the rightmost column-looking thing is actually the column picker. If you left-click on that, it provides you with a list of columns you can show. One of those is 'account'. You can then click on this column to sort by it. (You can also resize it by using the grabbers that delineate it from its adjacent columns in the header, and move it around by clicking and holding the mouse button to initiate a drag.)

The ability to quote only the selected text is a secret feature. If no text is selected, the feature should not be active and the whole message should be quoted. Is it possible that you (or some rogue utility software/add-on) is actually selecting just whitespace, tricking the secret feature? I know I sometimes randomly click on things while I am reading text, and I could see accidentally selecting text, but if it happens every time, that seems less likely.

You could check this by going to the edit menu when you would normally hit reply and see if the "copy" option is highlighted. If it is, this suggests the problem, and you can confirm by choosing copy and then pasting into a text editor and seeing what shows up.

I agree this is a really unpleasant problem to be having. Replying to messages is arguably one of the core features of an e-mail client...

Please see the following article which describes how you can either directly modify Thunderbird preferences or install a (3.0 compatible extension):
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Mailnews.re...*

Actually, here's the extension link:
https://nic-nac-project.org/~kaosmos/...

You are thinking of the "grouped by sort" feature. You can re-enable this by going to the "View" menu, selecting "Sort By", and then "Grouped by sort". Changing the sort mode will, by default, disable grouped by sort which is why this happened to you. Make sure "Date" is selected under "Sort By" if you want the the Today/Yesterday/etc. grouping.