Quoting Bruce Ferrell (bferrell@???):

> When Thunderbird came along, I never looked back and I have archives
> going back to 2001.
>
> When I JUST hit reply, just now, it wanted to send to Daniel.
>
> But I looked before I leapt, saw it was about to do exactly the
> opposite of what I wanted, so I fixed it.

I'm a longtime fan of Thunderbird, too, for a lot of reasons, but it's
actually been a few years since I used it day-to-day. When you say you
'fixed it', I'm curious about what you mean.

I _vaguely_ recall that Thunderbird tried to square the circle by _not_
having distinct reply-all and reply-sender commands by default, but
rather have a single 'Reply' operation that they try to make
sufficiently clever to do one underlying operation or the other by
figuring out the context. I also vaguely remember that you actually
_can_ have a specific 'Reply All' control but that by default it's not
on the default setup and you have to visit program configuration to say
that you want it.

One of the reasons I've never stayed with Thunderbird for my personal
use (only occasional corporate use) but rather remained with mutt is
that I prefer that my MUA[1] not try to be overly clever and Do What I
Mean, but rather Do What I Say. But, obviously, horses for courses, and
I continue to respect Thunderbird as a genuinely good choice.

And, as you suggest, one of the reasons is continuing to use a stable
(if creaky) choice of mailbox format, ye olde mbox format. Yay.


FWIW: 'MUAs' on http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Mail/
You'll notice that Mozilla Thunderbird is one of the very few
specifically recommended choices.

(Disclaimer: If parts of that page are now borderline-useless because,
e.g., they talk about GTK2-based programs in a world where the GNOME
asshats keep killing off old stable software as rapidly as possible, I
would not be the least surprised.)


[1] MUA = Mail User Agent, i.e., mail client program.