Decluttering Thunderbird/other alternatives?

[Linux for blind general discussion]

You can disable the calendar by going to view -> Today Pane -> Show 
Today Pane. It's ticked by default, and pressing the enter key on that 
option will untick it. You may also want to speed things up quite a bit 
by going to view -> Layout -> Message Pane and turning that off as well. 
Threading is another time saver, which I turned on at View -> Sort By -> 
Threaded, but this needs to be selected in every folder where you want 
threading. This just groups emails into conversations, and you can 
easily expand or collapse the conversation using the left and right 
arrow keys and delete an entire conversation that you are not interested 
in reading if it's collapsed with a single press of the delete key. Just 
be sure to expand a conversation before trying to open a message, or you 
could get inundated by message windows.


I know of no way to skip pressing the tab key a second time to get to 
the subject field when writing a message. The reason this is done is to 
allow you to write your message to more than one address. The first tab 
takes you to a field where you can begin writing a second email 
recipient. If you write something in that field, you will of course be 
allowed to tab to another empty recipient field. This feature does 
appear to be fairly new, as you used to have buttons to add a To: or CC: 
recipient to the message, but you just change the address type by 
pressing the "Other types of addressing" button now, which I believe 
just adds that type of field to your message, which can also take 
multiple recipients by tabbing off the first one and just writing in a 
second address. Usually just double tapping the tab key in this 
situation doesn't bother me much. I do hope these suggestions help you 
get the most from Thunderbird, as the only alternatives I know to mostly 
work are Seamonkey, which is similar in many ways to Thunderbird but 
seems to crash rather often, and Evolution, which works most of the time 
and is very fast, but for some reason Orca will sometimes randomly skip 
a paragraph in some messages.

~Kyle