I fully agree with your comment. Thunderbird is just plain terrible.

Over the weekend I migrated to a 100% Linux/open-source environment. So of course I went through a series of alternative apps. While you'd never find feature parity (eg. with MS Office and the Adobe Suite) existing alternatives are mostly good enough.

Thunderbird has been tooted to me as THE alternative to MS Outlook. What I found was a total mess of a software stack needing countless addons and customization to even get close to Outlook. Then I discovered Evolution. It was certainly different but worked pretty much flawlessly out of the box.