I took a look at Thunderbird again today. My main frustration with it in the past has been trying to convince it to check all my IMAP folders for new mail; there are lots of tickyboxes that I would expect to do this, but which don’t, and there’s a tickybox on every single folder enabling checking that folder, which is tedious. Today, I decided to keep at this for more than a few minutes, and use the Google, which turned up:

Thunderbird can download mail from all accounts when you start the program. Just open the Config Editor, search for the preference mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new, and change its value to true.

I don’t really think that the word “just” belongs in that sentence. I don’t even really know why this is an option, rather than there being a “no seriously, check my email” setting on the account if people really don’t always want this turned on. I thought the point of using something like this was not to have to learn all the knobs you need to twiddle to make it work, but perhaps I’m wrong?