Fortunately, most of my peeves with the program have been solved, and some of them were actually there, I just didn't see them. Here are some of the conclusions of my griping points:

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1) I still can't believe they went through till this release with this annoying system of forcing a new set of folders for every email address you own.

Obviously, this has been solved in the latest release. Now that it's possible to combine them, Thunderbird definitely holds an advantage here over Outlook, since you have the option to set up a group of folders for whichever accounts you like. That's what I like in general: the option.

In regards to the second part of that complaint, that I couldn't check all the addresses at once, I did find out I was wrong about that. For some reason I never noticed the little arrow to the right of the "Get Mail" button. Still, as you say, "Get All" should be the default.

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2) there doesn't seem to be a way to make the default screen anything other than the stupid welcome screen. Why can't I go straight to the inbox?

I believe I was wrong about this, but I could have sworn that it varied where it put me at the program start. Oh well.

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I'd love to be able to set the program so that when I reply to someone, the cursor is automatically placed at the top instead of the bottom.

Again, it just took a while to find the option. It's there somewhere, and I set all my accounts to the placement I prefer.

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when I double click on a folder to expand it, it instead opens another instance of Thunderbird.

This one is still an annoyance. It was there in the last version, it's still there in the new one.

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the spam filter does not work

I had the filter enabled for two days to test it out. Despite the upgrade to an entirely new version of the program, the filter is behaving the exact same bizarre way it did before. Oh well.

So all in all, Thunderbird will eventually do well, I think. I just think it isn't the potential MS opponent that Firefox is.