Thunderbird 5
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Kudos Mozilla for letting a blind man design the UI for Thunderbird 5!
(As always, click for enbiggenification.)Partial list of problems:
* You can either have a glass window background or a menu bar. As Thunderbird demonstrates, this is an exclusive-or. Also, you shouldn't have both a glass interface and a status bar.
* The behavior of the menu bar when the application is in the background is... perplexing. The menu titles correctly dim, but aren't actually disabled-- if you hover over them, they undim. I have absolutely no idea what they were thinking here. They somehow created a magical third state in between "disabled" and "enabled"!
* The bar under the menu bar appears to be a toolbar, but isn't? I guess? If you right-click it, it says it's a "Mail Toolbar". The "Quick Filter Bar" is also a toolbar, but behaves completely different and appears inside (not outside) the tab.
* "Mail Toolbar" buttons and menu titles are capitalized; controls inside the tab are not capitalized. Why???
* What the hell do the Left and Right arrows next to the "All Folders" label do? Well, clicking Right brings you to "Unread Items", clicking Left brings you to something called "Unified Folders". There's also "Recent Folders" and "Favorite Folders" in the rotation. Why can't it just show Unread in the same list as the other folders, like every other email client? This control seems completely unnecessary, given how much wasted space there is in this pane.
* Thunderbird obviously knows who I am (see: "to You" in the email pane), but still wants me to add myself to my own address book? WTF!
* Guess what the question mark button on the tab bar does. Go ahead guess. Whatever you guessed, you're wrong: it shows/hides the "Quick Filter Bar".
* Despite the header area using a glass background, none of it is draggable except the real title bar. Wrong. (I was about to put into an item saying that the email windows couldn't be moved, until I realized why they couldn't be moved.)
* Why does the email window, which does nothing but show a single email, have a progress spinner? What kind of progress is a view of a single email going to require?
* The placement of the search bar is bugging the shit out of me, but that seems petty compared to some of this other stuff.
Edit: * Sometimes the name of my email account and the Inbox folder will turn blue. I have no idea why this happens, in response to what, or what it's supposed to indicate. Clicking the folder "erases" the blue and changes the text back to black.
Edit: Oops, I posted a screenshot without an email open, so some of the gripes above you can't see in the screenshot. Sorry. Here's another shot:
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On Windows XP, it looks pretty much exactly like the previous version. So...there's that, I guess.
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Doh typo. Where I said:
* Guess what the question mark button on the tab bar does.
Should read:
* Guess what the magnifying glass button on the tab bar does.
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@Someone You Know said:
On Windows XP, it looks pretty much exactly like the previous version. So...there's that, I guess.
Oh.
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@blakeyrat said:
* The behavior of the menu bar when the application is in the background is... perplexing. The menu titles correctly dim, but aren't actually disabled-- if you hover over them, they undim. I have absolutely no idea what they were thinking here. They somehow created a magical third state in between "disabled" and "enabled"!
Obligatory "it's FILE_NOT_FOUND"
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@blakeyrat said:
* Why does the email window, which does nothing but show a single email, have a progress spinner? What kind of progress is a view of a single email going to require?
I didn't find a progress spinner in your screen shot, so I'm not entirely certain where it would be, but one reason it would be useful is when it's downloading images.
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I generally agree with most of what you said except for a few things:
What's wrong with having a glass interface and a status bar?? The menu bar is obviously shit but I don't see anything wrong with the status bar. At least I don't have to download a plugin to get it back (c.f. Firefox).
Which buttons in the tab page are not capitalized? I just don't see it, "All Folders", "Quick Filter", "Attachments" etc. are all capitalized.
About the progress spinner: it's probably indicating the download status of external images etc.
You should see their great effort at localization, though: The translated "Welcome to Thunderbird!" text overflows which shows that the font / line spacing is totally fucked up (see the highlighted part).
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@blakeyrat said:
* The behavior of the menu bar when the application is in the background is... perplexing. The menu titles correctly dim, but aren't actually disabled-- if you hover over them, they undim. I have absolutely no idea what they were thinking here. They somehow created a magical third state in between "disabled" and "enabled"!
Chrome, Opera, Firefox, Internet Explorer all do the same thing. A window not being in focus doesn't automatically disable the window's controls.
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@topspin said:
Which buttons in the tab page are not capitalized? I just don't see it, "All Folders", "Quick Filter", "Attachments" etc. are all capitalized.
All of the controls in the email pane (and email window, if it's open in a window) are lowercase. Note: this might be a localization issue.
Take a look at the second screenshot in my first post. "reply", "forward", "archive", "junk", "delete". All lowercase. All other buttons are capitalized. (Capitalized is correct; but being wrong bugs me less than being inconsistent.)
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I hate it when you've got a resize panel border that isn't, like I assume you have here between the list of mail and the email pane, or the lists of folders. Having a more substantial divider gives nice visual clues, plus usually a larger target for resizing.
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May I humbly suggest you try a different theme? (Personally, I find Mostly Crystal blends in very well. I can't stand the default theme.)
But TRWTF is having 54271 mails in your inbox.
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The arrows in the folder view and the turns blue were already there in previous versions. And a folder turns blue if its content changes by an automatic action (like getting mails or email filter rules or archiving or whatever) while you did not view it. So you can easily look at all the blue folders if you want to know what changed since you looked last. (Moving an email to another folder does not color it blue, since it was not an automatic action). The "blueness" will disappear once you restart Thunderbird.
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@zipfruder said:
Chrome, Opera, Firefox, Internet Explorer all do the same thing. A window not being in focus doesn't automatically disable the window's controls.
It's appropriate with toolbar buttons, not menus. Menus have always been disabled when the window is not in focus, and disabled menus have no rollover effect. Toolbar buttons, on the other hand, stay enabled while the window is not in focus, so that's a different story. Try it with Calculator. Unfocus the window, then notice how the menu titles have no rollover effects, but the buttons in the window do.
Now I'm not sure why it's done this way, but the point is: it is.
@boomzilla said:
I hate it when you've got a resize panel border that isn't, like I assume you have here between the list of mail and the email pane, or the lists of folders. Having a more substantial divider gives nice visual clues, plus usually a larger target for resizing.
They are indeed resizeable, and the clickable area to resize is indeed tiny.
@boomzilla said:
May I humbly suggest you try a different theme?
If they have a theme that doesn't look like ass, you'd think they'd ship it.
@boomzilla said:
But TRWTF is having 54271 mails in your inbox.
The disk space cost of storing 54k emails is lower than the mental cost of deciding when to hit delete or not.
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@blakeyrat said:
Menus have always been disabled when the window is not in focus, and disabled menus have no rollover effect. Try it with Calculator. Unfocus the window, then notice how the menu titles have no rollover effects, but the buttons in the window do.
Oh, really?
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@blakeyrat said:
@zipfruder said:
In XP, at least, this isn't entirely correct. I just tried it with Calculator, and while the menus on the non-focused window appear disabled, they still highlight when the mouse cursor rolls over them.A window not being in focus doesn't automatically disable the window's controls.
It's appropriate with toolbar buttons, not menus. Menus have always been disabled when the window is not in focus, and disabled menus have no rollover effect. Toolbar buttons, on the other hand, stay enabled while the window is not in focus, so that's a different story. Try it with Calculator. Unfocus the window, then notice how the menu titles have no rollover effects, but the buttons in the window do.
Now I'm not sure why it's done this way, but the point is: it is.
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@spamcourt said:
@blakeyrat said:
Menus have always been disabled when the window is not in focus, and disabled menus have no rollover effect. Try it with Calculator. Unfocus the window, then notice how the menu
Oh, really?
titles have no rollover effects, but the buttons in the window do.Oh for fuck's sake. I haven't used XP in a fucking decade. I don't know what XP does anymore. I'm using fucking Windows 7. Everything in this UI critique assumes Windows fucking 7. This should have been obvious from the screenshots. You are a pedantic dickweed. Please die in a fire. Thank you.
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I should try to see if I could get thunderbird 5 set up for my gmail acounts. I tried once but had trouble, gave up and switched to windows mail.
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@blakeyrat said:
@spamcourt said:
@blakeyrat said:
Menus have always been disabled when the window is not in focus, and disabled menus have no rollover effect. Try it with Calculator. Unfocus the window, then notice how the menu
titles have no rollover effects, but the buttons in the window do
Oh, really?Oh for fuck's sake. I haven't used XP in a fucking decade. I don't know what XP does anymore. I'm using fucking Windows 7. Everything in this UI critique assumes Windows fucking 7. This should have been obvious from the screenshots. You are a pedantic dickweed. Please die in a fire. Thank you.
No no no no no. For someone who likes to read the riot act when he sees unfamiliar terms, and then says: "Menus have always been disabled..." You can die in a fire.
This is the first time in this post that Windows 7 was mentioned. WE ARE NOT FUCKING TELEPATHIC.
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@boomzilla said:
WE ARE NOT FUCKING TELEPATHIC.
Speak for yourself, I am and blakeyrat has already heard my rant and coward before my telepathic superiority.
At least I hope that was him, I'm not always that accurate, my apologies if I mind melted someone else.
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@boomzilla said:
No no no no no. For someone who likes to read the riot act when he sees unfamiliar terms, and then says: "Menus have always been disabled..." You can die in a fire.
This is the first time in this post that Windows 7 was mentioned. WE ARE NOT FUCKING TELEPATHIC.
Look, there's only one of me, and there's like 50 snarling jackals just waiting for me to slip up even the slightest amount so they can post dickweedisms. Even if I had the pedantic dickweed gene, which I don't, numbers alone say that there's no way I could possibly attach all the necessary disclaimers to every post to prevent dickweedisms.
So here's the question. Did spamcourt and boomzilla genuinely believe that the behavior of Windows XP was relevant to this discussion? Even though the screenshots were obviously either Vista or Windows 7? Or were they just being dickweeds? If the former, then I apologize.
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@blakeyrat said:
Look, there's only one of me, and there's like 50 snarling jackals just waiting for me to slip up even the slightest amount so they can post dickweedisms. Even if I had the pedantic dickweed gene, which I don't, numbers alone say that there's no way I could possibly attach all the necessary disclaimers to every post to prevent dickweedisms.So here's the question. Did spamcourt and boomzilla genuinely believe that the behavior of Windows XP was relevant to this discussion? Even though the screenshots were obviously either Vista or Windows 7? Or were they just being dickweeds? If the former, then I apologize.
All you had to do was ignore it, but you couldn't. Yes, I knew that you weren't posting XP screen shots, but so what? It's still another interesting data point, as far as I'm concerned (spamcourt, too, apparently). Why did I look at XP? It's what I had immediately at hand. Shit, I wasn't even nasty when I said it (though spamcourt was a bit more confrontational, as is the style around here--what was I thinking?).
As to the relevancy: Maybe what you saw was some artifact of aero? If you turn aero off, do you get the same behavior? That would be interesting, and would contradict your "always" qualifier, even if, post hoc, we limit that to 7.
I thought you were a software developer. When you try to debug something, is your first thought always correct about what the actual problem is? Of course not. Maybe this isn't something Thunderbird is controlling, but some effect of windows. Either way, it's an inconsistency that's changed, and its having worked in previous versions of Windows is just as relevant as your bitching about the menu roll overs apparently being inconsistent under Windows 7. Maybe it's just a bug in 7.
Apology accepted.
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For the record, I get the exact same behavior in Windows 7 (which I run with the memory hogging Themes service disabled).
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@blakeyrat said:
If they have a theme that doesn't look like ass, you'd think they'd ship it.
They don't, hence they didn't. (Is it just me, or are default themes/skins ugly by definition?)
@blakeyrat said:
The disk space cost of storing 54k emails is lower than the mental cost of deciding when to hit delete or not.
I was referring to having 54k mails in a single folder. But as long as you find what you're looking for, that's fine, I guess. /shrug
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- I would kind of expect the spinner, personally.
- I could do without all the options for the folder pane except Unified Folders, although there seem to be a couple of kinks left to work out with Junk and Archives in Thunderbird 3. However, I'm not sure there's any point even making Unified Folders available unless you have multiple accounts set up. Possibly multiple IMAP accounts, specifically, but I'm less sure of that.
- Mozilla might not have a theme that doesn't look like crap. All the good ones might be third-party contributions. Windows XP, on the other hand, had the Classic theme...but I digress.
- I agree categorically with anything that can be covered under "If it looks like a toolbar or menu bar, I should have some way to reposition it and anything on it however I want."
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Most of these things seem like the weird inconsistencies you get when a product is rushed out the door in a hurry. In this case they were in a hurry to get a new 5.0 version out so it would match up with the current version of Firefox. Considering how much they have screwed up Firefox, I'm surprised Thunderbird isn't a lot worse.
One of things that bugs me is the fonts. First it was Firefox 4.0 and now Thunderbird 5 -- in both of them the font used for all the menus and toolbars is much smaller than the previous versions. Do all the Mozilla programmers have super magnifying eyes? After some Googling I was able to figure out how to use the UserChrome.css file to get the fonts back to a more readable size and now I've had to copy those settings over to Thunderbird as well. Also, emails in the Inbox look different, even though it's (supposedly) the same font I was using in the previous version. New unread emials that are bold look especially weird. WTF, why are they fucking with the fonts?
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I find fewer and fewer reasons to stay with Thunderbird, even though it's served me well all those years.
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But while there are good alternatives for Firefox I don't know of really good ones for Thunderbird.
I don't like web mail so that's not an option. Other free software isn't any better, Outlook isn't very good either and don't even get me started on the IBM software-which-must-not-be-named we use at work.
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@topspin said:
But while there are good alternatives for Firefox I don't know of really good ones for Thunderbird.
Outlook. I did the (hellishly arduous) migration years ago and will never look back.At any rate, all the new kids are all about the webmails, so email clients are getting the complete shaft from the OSS "community".
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blakey, while I agree with the majority of your points, I find Thunderbird to be fine for what I need it to do: read emails and RSS feeds. It's also free, so I'm willing to cut it some slack, particularly since it gets very little love from Mozilla (while Firefox, their bloated poster child, is rather more shitty in my opinion).
Thunderbird changes a folder's name to bold + blue when there is a new message in said folder. Unfortunately it often gets a bit retarded and either forgets to append the new message count to the folder name, or decides that a new message has arrived when actually nothing has changed.
@Weng said:
@topspin said:
But while there are good alternatives for Firefox I don't know of really good ones for Thunderbird.
Outlook. I did the (hellishly arduous) migration years ago and will never look back.At any rate, all the new kids are all about the webmails, so email clients are getting the complete shaft from the OSS "community".
I believe he was referring to good, free alternatives to TB.
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@The_Assimilator said:
I believe he was referring to good, free alternatives to TB.
And who the hellfuck doesn't own Microsoft Office? Seriously, the other alternative is what, OpenOffice? If you use OpenOffice, complaining about Fireturd is just stupid.
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@Weng said:
And who the hellfuck doesn't own Microsoft Office?
I don't have Office. I rarely use documents, and it's a waste of resources to go crack Outlook just for a couple emails.
@Weng said:
If you use OpenOffice, complaining about Fireturd is just stupid.
Nope.
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@dhromed said:
@The_Assimilator said:
RSS feeds.
TB reads RSS feeds?
Yep - "News & Blogs" folder. Right-click it, subscribe, enter URL, done.
@Weng said:
@The_Assimilator said:
I believe he was referring to good, free alternatives to TB.
And who the hellfuck doesn't own Microsoft Office? Seriously, the other alternative is what, OpenOffice? If you use OpenOffice, complaining about Fireturd is just stupid.I don't own Office because (a) I already pay MS enough for their OS, (b) Google Docs is good enough for 99% of what I need office-type software for at home. At work we have Office, but it's essentially free since my company is an MS Gold Partner.
I don't have a particular problem with Gmail's web interface, but my bandwidth is constrained and thus having TB store local copies of my messages saves me a lot of time.
AND DON'T MENTION OPENOFFICE BLAKEY WILL GO APESHIT AGAIN OHGOD
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Opera. Has integrated email cleint which's pretty good in recent editions, does do RSS treating them like yet another kind of email accounts, deserves more than 1.8% of marketshare, can be made to look like a good traditional browser instead of yet another Chrome clone (tho does look so by default since v10.5.)
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@Weng said:
And who the hellfuck doesn't own Microsoft Office?
Me neither. Never had it, IIRC. On my first PC (Windows ME! :O) I did have Works though, which had a version of Word instead of Works Word Processor for reasons unknown to me.
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@bannedfromcoding said:
Opera.
I don't like having email and webbrowser done by the same program. Actually, that was the reason why I didn't skip to Mozilla back in the day and was really happy when Mozilla was split into two separate programs. Also, does Opera have support for extensions yet? I mean, other than the stupid applets it offers in the version I'm forced to use here at school computers.
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@The_Assimilator said:
AND DON'T MENTION OPENOFFICE BLAKEY WILL GO APESHIT AGAIN OHGOD
Actually, right now I'm writing an OpenOffice plug-in in Java to let me read emails from the spreadsheet program. The best part is that along with Java's built-in widgets, it'll also include Flash widgets to make things really smooth and pretty. To keep things safe and secure, it'll even be password protected using MD5 hashing! I can't wait to show you guys!! Naturally, it will be GPL'd, I would never have my software LOCKED UP behind some nasty PROPRIETARY license.
Joking!! :D@blakeyrat said:
Look, there's only one of me, and there's like 50 snarling jackals just waiting for me to slip up even the slightest amount so they can post dickweedisms. Even if I had the pedantic dickweed gene, which I don't, numbers alone say that there's no way I could possibly attach all the necessary disclaimers to every post to prevent dickweedisms.
That's what sigs are for, no? Your sig will be awesome! Let's start designing it!
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The funny thing about Thunderbird is that it did the same version number skip Winamp did. IIRC, Winamp 3 was a complete rewrite of Winamp which did a lot of things a lot differently (canceled some backwards compatibility), which people didn't like so much; so then they... "merged" Winamp 2 and 3 to Winamp 5 (because... it's the sum!), making Winamp 5 backwards compatible to both versions 2 and 3. The skip of version 4 was weird, but it had a really fun explanation.
Thunderbird 5 however only has its version number because they want to catch up with Chrome's version number.
I remember that not so long ago, there wasn't a Thunderbird 3.0 for a long time because there just weren't many changes that would justify the version number change...
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@derula said:
my first PC (Windows ME! :O)
WTF?, I feel old
On the other hand if your first experience with a PC was Windows ME you surely had a troubled childhood
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@derula said:
Also, does Opera have support for extensions yet? I mean, other than the stupid applets it offers in the version I'm forced to use here at school computers.
Pre-v11 has only the stupid "widgets", and Unite plugins (which I personlly don't quite get what are meant for).
Current version has some new extensions API, based on HTML5 and JS. There are some extensions written for it. That's as much as I know, I don't use them.
Adblock is integrated, Flash/Scriptblock is integrated (they just finally added a whitelist for those in v11.5 - that's why I earlier used an UserJS script instead of the official facility), UserJS lets you do a lot of tiny things yourself, and I much prefer the (integrated) Dragonfly over Firebug (both are better from Chrome's equivalent, if anyone wants to know my opinion). I don't like tons of thirdparty extensions messing up with my browser. ;)https://addons.opera.com/addons/extensions/
http://www.opera.com/addons/extensions/develop/
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@The_Assimilator said:
Thunderbird changes a folder's name to bold + blue when there is a new message in said folder. Unfortunately it often gets a bit retarded and either forgets to append the new message count to the folder name, or decides that a new message has arrived when actually nothing has changed.
If you're subscribed to a shared IMAP folder in Thunderbird, that folder's unread messages count at any point throughout the day seems to be some random number between 0 and x, inclusive, where x is the number of unread messages there were in the folder when you started Thunderbird. Even if those original messages have been read, moved, and/or deleted, the unread count for the folder will still fluctuate up and down that range every time Thunderbird checks the folder for new messages. I'm starting to think that this is some kind of quantum interference effect caused by copies of Thunderbird in parallel universes where I have yet to read all the messages in the folder.
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@serguey123 said:
@derula said:
my first PC (Windows ME! :O)
WTF?, I feel old
On the other hand if your first experience with a PC was Windows ME you surely had a troubled childhood
Wasn't my first experience with a PC, was the first one I owned. I had written trivial programs in QBasic before on my grandma's machine or Borland Delphi on my Dad's :D
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@bannedfromcoding said:
Pre-v11 has only the stupid "widgets", and Unite plugins (which I personlly don't quite get what are meant for).
Current version has some new extensions API, based on HTML5 and JS. There are some extensions written for it. That's as much as I know, I don't use them.
Adblock is integrated, Flash/Scriptblock is integrated (they just finally added a whitelist for those in v11.5 - that's why I earlier used an UserJS script instead of the official facility), UserJS lets you do a lot of tiny things yourself, and I much prefer the (integrated) Dragonfly over Firebug (both are better from Chrome's equivalent, if anyone wants to know my opinion). I don't like tons of thirdparty extensions messing up with my browser. ;)Ah, so seems that current versions are pretty much up-to-speed now on the costumizability part.
Still, I guess I'll switch to KMail on my home machine instead... My reason for Thunderbird was mostly that I could transfer mail data and settings stuff between Windows and Linux, but I've switched to IMAP now (I was using POP mainly because Thunderbird didn't want to merge two IMAP accounts into one (virtual) Inbox... but really, POP is crap) so that's not that big of a deal; also, if really needed, KDE runs on Windows now...
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@derula said:
Still, I guess I'll switch to KMail on my home machine instead...
I've been using KMail for a while now. Generally, I like it. Unfortunately, it doesn't integrate with Exchange calendars, but that's not a killer for me. It's way faster than evolution when dealing with Exchange (and actually, the IT geniuses at my company screwed the webmail stuff that evolution used to integrate with Exchange).
Its main WTF is how it can't forward html messages. That's not really a killer for me, either, but it's pretty mind boggling how they refuse to implement that.
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@The_Assimilator said:
blakey, while I agree with the majority of your points, I find Thunderbird to be fine for what I need it to do: read emails and RSS feeds.
I never said it wasn't fit for its purpose. I said it was ugly and has a lot of weird UI choices and some outright UI bugs.
@The_Assimilator said:
It's also free, so I'm willing to cut it some slack,
That is where we differ.
@Weng said:
And who the hellfuck doesn't own Microsoft Office? Seriously, the other alternative is what, OpenOffice? If you use OpenOffice, complaining about Fireturd is just stupid.
I made the strategic error of installing the "Home and Education" or whatever it's called version of Office 2011 on this computer when it came out. That version doesn't come with Outlook. And I'm too lazy to dig around and find my full copy of 2007, which I know I have around here somewhere.
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@Someone You Know said:
If you're subscribed to a shared IMAP folder in Thunderbird, that folder's unread messages count at any point throughout the day seems to be some random number between 0 and x, inclusive, where x is the number of unread messages there were in the folder when you started Thunderbird.
Yes! I was getting this yesterday, when it INSISTED I had an unread mail and I didn't. If I flipped the view to "Unreal Emails Only", it would still list all emails... apparently on the theory that since I didn't have any unread emails it should show all of them? I dunno. But it still couldn't locate the unread email. Stuff like that drives me batty.
It might be because I had the Gmail web interface open and I was setting read bits there, too... maybe? But isn't the whole point of IMAP that the two email boxes stay in-sync?
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@The_Assimilator said:
I don't own Office because (a) I already pay MS enough for their OS, (b) Google Docs is good enough for 99% of what I need office-type software for at home. At work we have Office, but it's essentially free since my company is an MS Gold Partner.
What he said.@The_Assimilator said:I don't have a particular problem with Gmail's web interface, but my bandwidth is constrained and thus having TB store local copies of my messages saves me a lot of time.
I don't have bandwidth problems fortunately. While I like to keep a local copy of my emails (even if none of them are terribly important) just because. But I use a script I run once every blue moon. @The_Assimilator said:AND DON'T MENTION OPENOFFICE BLAKEY WILL GO APESHIT AGAIN OHGOD
I recently upgraded my Linux distro and I now have LibreOffice. I haven't run it yet though, so I don't have the slightest opinion on it.@derula said:
The skip of version 4 was weird, but it had a really fun explanation.
Besides the "winamp 4 skins" thing, 4 is considered an unlucky number in Japan, where the number is pronounced the same as "death". I don't know if this was considered though.
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@Zecc said:
4 is considered an unlucky number in Japan, where the number is sometimes pronounced the same as "death". I don't know if this was considered though.
FTFY
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@blakeyrat said:
@Someone You Know said:
If you're subscribed to a shared IMAP folder in Thunderbird, that folder's unread messages count at any point throughout the day seems to be some random number between 0 and x, inclusive, where x is the number of unread messages there were in the folder when you started Thunderbird.
Yes! I was getting this yesterday, when it INSISTED I had an unread mail and I didn't. If I flipped the view to "Unreal Emails Only", it would still list all emails... apparently on the theory that since I didn't have any unread emails it should show all of them? I dunno. But it still couldn't locate the unread email. Stuff like that drives me batty.
It might be because I had the Gmail web interface open and I was setting read bits there, too... maybe? But isn't the whole point of IMAP that the two email boxes stay in-sync?
I don't think that's quite it. It happens to me all the time, and I never use a web-based interface for this email account. However, since (in my case, at least) it's a shared folder, I could see it having something to do with other people who are subscribed to the folder having downloaded the messages but not having read them, and their status getting pushed back to the server. If that's the case, then maybe it's more a problem with IMAP (or our particular implementation of it) than Thunderbird.
