Thunderbird 3.0 RC 1 for Mac
The other day, Thunderbird 3 Beta 4 offered to automatically upgrade to Thunderbird 3 RC 1. You would have upgraded too, wouldn’t you? Of course you would have! Guess what? It turned out that it wasn’t a good idea at all. 
The next day, I noticed that I couldn’t send e-mail anymore. WTF? I was greeted by a dialogue box reporting that the e-mail message could not be sent. (Sorry, I didn’t capture a picture of the dialogue box.) Of course, this pissed me off no end. OK, so it’s a RC 1, but surely it must be able to send e-mail. Isn’t that the purpose of Thunderbird?
Luckily for me, I still had the Beta 3 .dmg. I uninstalled RC 1 and downgraded to Beta 3. All was well again — I could send e-mail again.
[Aside: Why does the Thunderbird web site mention all of the beta releases, yet, nothing prior to RC 1 is available for download anymore? If I didn't have a copy of the Beta 3 .dmg, I would not have been able to downgrade and resume sending e-mail.]
Today, I found out why RC 1 would not send e-mail. I finally found the google magic which revealed this post. The solution to my problem? Upgrade Enigmail.
ARGH! If Enigmail needed to be upgraded to work with Thunderbird 3 RC 1, then RC 1 must be broken. Why then, after initially upgrading to RC 1, didn’t the Add-On Manager compatibility detection tell me that I needed to upgrade Enigmail? It should have, even though it’s RC 1.
Tonight, I upgraded to Thunderbird 3 RC 1 (again) and also upgraded Enigmail. Thunderbird appears to be sending e-mail again. Hoo-fucking-ray.
The only reason that I use Thunderbird (with Enigmail) is to GPG encrypt some of my e-mail. I’d much rather use Apple’s Mail because it integrates with the rest of OS X so much better, but it does not support GPG. For me, this bad Thunderbird experience is the straw that’s finally broken the camel’s back. I’m going to investigate S/MIME certificates and learn how to use them with Apple Mail.
I’d prefer to GPG encrypt my e-mail, but if migrating to S/MIME certificates makes my e-mail experience that much better, then I’m prepared to migrate away from Thunderbird and start using Apple Mail.