The portable version is a product of Portable Apps. They use the code to create their version.

Portable Apps have been doing portable Thunderbird and portable Firefox (since 0.8 version?) for a long time now and have been trusted since.

Even Mozilla does not have a portable version of their Firefox browser for desktop and the Thunderbird community can barely make desktop Thunderbird Releases as is to be adding to their workload.

This makes any discussion on portable version drawbacks more difficult.

Just have tried to get rid of the outlook express in a virtual machine (changing from w7 to w10) and have found that the TB portable functionality and usability does not satisfy my needs based on my outlook express experience. So old, and still the best - for reading and replying.

It would be too annoying to install the normal TB just to check if both versions perform in the same way.

Then use Outlook. It is your choice.

rather, there is no choice, and that is the problem.

What a pity that volunteers developing a free software do not have the ambition to catch up with existing solutions, these, which are so commonly used that they became a standard. One can say that these are the attributes expected, without which the tool is considered to be useless.

Outlook express runs in a second, launching TB takes ages - after clicking "run" you can go brew tea. It also works much more slowly. It reminds smartphone - gadget for everything, with the exception of the telephone calls. Download / sync only on request is not manageable without deep study and research. And so on,

Because everyone here seems to be satisfied with the TB and would rather not see the need to improve it in the direction to make it suitable to perform simple tasks as well as Outlook Express at least, there is really no need for a discussion.

regards I greet all be happy with TB as it is.

There is clear and obvious choice. You can pay Microsoft for Outlook. You could also pay for the Bat! or any of a number of mail clients. There are also other open source clients. So please do not suggest there is a shortage of choice.

You appear to think Outlook Express was good. That is your opinion. My opinion is thank god it is dead it was a security nightmare that mangled mail and corrupted it's own files with monotonous regularity. It is truly amazing how much two individuals can differ in their opinion of a product is it not.

But you have made only two comments that indicate anything about why you might have your opinion.

Thunderbird is slow. I will grant you it is slower in some regards, but have you ever placed it in offline mode and changed the option to make it restart in offline mode. On the toolbar > Options > Advanced > Network and disk space. Click offline and set it to offline.

Startup is fast and your other gripe of not getting mail unless you ask for it is also covered by that step. I hardly call forcing Thunderbird to startup in offline mode something that required "deep research"

But lets look at Outlook Express. Email software last updated by it's authors more than a decade ago. Internet Explorer Version 6 was the last real update. Microsoft themselves abandoned it with the release of internet Explorer V7 and Vista in favor of Windows mail and then Windows live mail.

In the days when Outlook Express was developed (As Microsoft Internet Mail and News) most internet was dial up. So starting up online was not really an option as to do so would have cost at least a phone call and probably several minutes for the modem to initialize, dial and connect. At the Time I also paid for internet "Time" by the minute. SO in that environment it made sense that a mail client make as few online trips to the mail and news servers as was possible, Grab all the data and disconnect to keep the costs low.

Move forward almost 20 years. The internet is on demand and people are "always connected" Why would anyone developing modern mail applications even consider adopting a clunky work practice such as was in Outlook Express? Start the application online, get the mail as soon as it starts, get it again regularly. Those are the imperatives of modern mail.

Most mail these days is synchronized using IMAP to phones and tablets. That is in addition to coming into Thunderbird. People expect the mail that showed up on their phone to be on their desktop. Not waiting for a click to retrieve it from the mail server.

Most of the true slowness we see in Thunderbird can be directly traced back to poorly behaved anti virus programs. Have you tried creating exceptions for you Thunderbird profile folders in your anti virus. Some like Norton's scan the same mail file on opening and every time the mail is downloaded. I have asked them why, but all I get are platitudes about risks that they fail to back up with facts. Then I get their users in this forum complaining about slow programs. But Symantec are not the only ones that have little regard for the other software on the PC or the data either for that matter. But that is another story entirely.

I have no doubt you like Outlook Express. I used it for a few years, before moving to Thunderbird about 10 years ago. But just because things were done some way in Outlook Express does not make it the right way to do it. Or even a standards compliant way of doing it. And certainly not the safe way to do it.

While you may think Microsoft solutions are the standard the rest of us should be aiming for it is not the case. The Internet Engineering task-force sets the standards, and your beloved Outlook Express followed precious few of them.

Thunderbird on the other hand gets regular security updates, has more options and features that ever was conceived by the folk that created Outlook Express and has a huge repository of add-ons to add features.

A bit like comparing Wordpad and Word really. Outlook express like Wordpad is a capable but very basic tool. Thunderbird, like word is a rich and complex tool that is probably overkill for most users. However it is more likely to suit more people because it has more ways of doing things to suit most people.

Unfortunately with all feature rich applications learning to use it is not like winding a pocket watch. It takes time and energy. Sometime a lot. I have sat through weeks of training on Microsoft Excel. But it has loads of featured I do not even pretend to understand even now.

If you actually care to elucidate what it is that your are trying to do, perhaps someone can show you how to do it. But for all intents and purposes the portable version of Thunderbird "is" Thunderbird with a wrapper around it to make what is meant to be installed work from a USB drive. Just as your virtual machine hides the real hardware from the operating system

Thank you for your comprehensive statement.

I think there was some misunderstanding, not saying that outlook express (OE) is better in everything than Thunderbird (TB), only saying that TB lacks of basic OE usability which is expected by OE users. In fact, this was OE which teach us.

Let us think not in terms of experts, merging mail with other applications. Let us think about an ordinary user, who uses the mail in the same style and scope as traditional paper mail.

Such a user, if he/she want to change email client, must bear the cost of making a choice based on the opinions of other users, cost to learn new software and cost of its testing. Actually, testing for the presence of possible bugs left, and for the presence of "smart solutions." These solutions, in which the developer is trying to outwit users. One always pay time, and sometimes loss of data, irrespective of any charge for the software. In this sense, taking into account the charge of changing email client and the expected software features, the OE user has no choice but to stick with OE. For this reason I used OE in the windows 7 in a virtual XP. The cost of using such a solution was smaller than switching to TB. If the virtual XP does not contain errors probably I have stayed at the same solution also in the windows 10.

The only problems with OE, I had, where those related to the growth of inbox to 2 GB. On a daily basis, based on POP3, it worked reliably and was simple to use.

For the casual user IMAP is a nightmare. because it seems that the creators of the protocol have forgotten that the mail server belongs to someone else. This means that the server owner can delete messages not only on the server, but through IMAP on the user computer as well. User must secure manually downloaded from the server messages against deleting. In the POP such problem does not occur. What has been downloaded is already owned by the user and is protected against email provider.

The basic law of the users is entitlement to their own data. This means that they should have access to them also using other software. Both TB and OE allows to save messages in the file system. However, OE, while saving messages, sets the modification date of the message file on the date of the message. TB sets the file date to date of "export". One can not sort the message files chronologically.

For me the only acceptable way of using TB is to set it offline. It would be for me unacceptable that the program could retrieve and delete messages in an unexpected by me moment, without my attention. It is a pity that after downloading new messages program remains online, instead of automatically to return to offline.

In my case OE starts in 8 seconds --- TB in 35, in offline mode, with the same collection of messages in the inbox.

For those for whom online connection is the imperative , a good solution is to use Firefox to access the mail server. The only one reason why people need an email client, such as TB, or OE, is to have messages on their own computers offline. Archived.

And these messages must be safe, indelible by someone else, and even in certain mail uses by the same user, and possible to access by means of other software in case of resignation of currently used.

Average users these days get mail on multiple devices. To my eyes it even appears the less technically skilled the individual the more devices get their mail. But regardless, IMAP is the only practical way to manage multiple devices. Most mobile mail is received in apps. so the desktop client must follow suit, or we get another load of "my sent mail is not downloaded" or "my read mail arrives unread" or a dozen other questions from people who expect seamless synchronization. To expect a silo of immutable data is what folk like me have and value. Not the average user. Do not mislead yourself. We are in the minority.

My son recently installed dos 6 and windows 3.11. It loaded in about half the time of Vista, which he replaced. it was blindingly fast really. Did he keep that operating system. No. It did almost everything a modern operating system does. But only old 16bit software would run on it. Likewise Outlook Express is a dead duck. There is no point lamenting it's demise. Even less point in creating virtual machines to prop it up. The ANSI standard it uses by default to create mails is obsolete. Replaced by UNICODE. Modern mail clients have difficulty rendering ANSI emails, just as they have difficulty with those from Eudora. I see a time when mail servers will simply refuse to accept ANSI emails. The support issues they cause cost more than they are worth.

I would go mad trying to manage my 15 or so email accounts in Firefox, Edge or any browser. None of the providers offer a user interface and mail management tools even vaguely similar to what I use. I migrated from Outlook Express a long time ago because it did not meet my needs and was continually corrupting it's data store so I lost mail.

The bottom line is the longer you resist change the more difficult the inevitable transition will be. That you have to change many setting in Thunderbird to get to what you want does not surprise me. Power users always do have that issue. With any software. That you can is the important point.

Thunderbird has many deficiencies and future plans for a number of changes, but turning it in to a 20 year old outlook express clone is not among them. Just as we have steadfastly resisted the urging of the Eudora folks that we need to do it the "Eudora way" because that is the right way.

Users have different ideas on what is right. I was horrified with the Outlook Express caper of setting file dates you are so enamored by. That was utter rubbish. A lie. The file was created at the moment the file was exported. I expected the files exported today to be at the top of an export list. Not down the bottom like I had done it 2 years ago. Forensically it was a total disaster. So you like it, I was horrified and most pleased to get to what I saw as a "real" export.

But you are more than welcome to continue using your old software. When you are eventually forced to use something else all the automatic conversion programs will probably have been retired, just as Thunderbird has retired it's Eudora import, or only run on operating systems you no longer own. If you think the learning curve is great now. It will only get worse with time and the conversion process of you proprietary data (DBX) will become very difficult.

I speak from experience here. I have been involved with data migrations from legacy Cobol mainframe applications and the older they are, the longer it takes and the more is costs. Both in terms of time and experts that have to be hired.

I do not speak from experience however ages ago have been working in computer science faculty. I speak as a reasonable computer user.

Most users use free e-mail, and that means that 90 percent of the messages are spam. However, even in the case of users with multiple devices, it does not mean superiority of imap over pop. True, the user has the ability to delete messages on all devices at one time, but at the same time it means that all his faults also move to all his devices.

The main thing is not to lose important messages, which need reaction.

I tried to use TB portable. Why portable? To avoid problems resulting from the installation. I deleted about 500 messages from the inbox in TB. They were moved to the trash, locally and on the server watched by Firefox. I emptied Trash locally when offline. I switched to online. Trash on the server became empty, but TB has loaded all deleted messages to the inbox.

Completely deleting (delete + empty) in the same way a single message works. But when I deleted a message in TB, and then through html moved it back to the inbox on the server, locally in the TB trash was emptied but in the inbox has appeared another message from the same day, the one deleted a long time ago.

Do not tell me that TB is suited to manage messages. It's better to use the total commander in combination with the eml viewer. But for this purpose modification date of the files should be correct.

Creation date is associated with the file. Modification date is connected with its contents. The content of an .eml file is a message, and so modification date should specify the date of the message. Period.

I'm not saying that TB should resemble OE, but consider entering the characteristics that are considered to be useful.

And the fundamental thing. How many years of study you need to learn TB? E.g. I not noticed information, how are marked messages, whose content is only on the server, from those whose content is also locally. The difference should be as visible as in the case of read and unread messages.

Basically you have no idea what TB is doing. A window should be on-demand, which shows the synchronization step by step.

Keep writing, please

re :I can not see a portable version of thunderbird on Mozilla site, why?

Because they do not do a portable version. Simple answer really. It is done by portableapps.

• http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/thunderbird_portable

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Running_from_a_USB_drive_(Thunderbird)

It is an official build of Thunderbird that has been repackaged "as a complete, removable drive-friendly email client." One of its key features is a special launcher to make your Thunderbird extensions portable.

If you have issues with portable thunderbird then perhaps you should ask those who created it. They have forums and support mentioned on the website.

re: who are the programmers of portable version on portable apps? Ask this in the correct forum for portable apps - they may answer.

re: Do have both version the same functionality? Basically yes. It is important to chose a fast USB drive, because USB drives are slow compared to a hard disk.

re ;how are marked messages, whose content is only on the server, from those whose content is also locally. The difference should be as visible as in the case of read and unread messages. I'm assuming you are now talking about imap mail accounts, who by default only download headers and when email is selected it is retrieved from server and stored in temp cache to facilitate viewing. If emails are synchronised for offline use then a copy is stored in the profile name folder mail account. If content is stored in the profile name folder then it will be visible when in offline mode. So 'Offline' mode will answer this.

Pop mail accounts download to thunderbird profile name folder pop mail account and therefore are stored locally, so they will be visible in offline mode anyway.

Offline mode can be selected: Quick method: click on two blue screen icon located bottom left in Status Bar, it will change to two black screen icon when offline. click on two black screen icon to return to online mode.

Via 'Menu Bar':

• 'File' > 'Offline' > 'Work Offline'

Via 'Mail Toolbar':

• 'Menu icon' > 'File' > 'Offline' > 'Work Offline'

Offline settings are managed here: Via 'Menu Bar':

• 'Tools' > 'Options' > 'Advanced' > 'Network & Disc Space' tab

OR Via 'Mail Toolbar':

• 'Menu icon' > 'Options' > 'Options' > 'Advanced' > 'Network & Disc Space' tab

• click on 'Offline...' button
• make all the choices you require and click on OK
• click on OK

I believe this answers the question.

Always try to download messages for offline use, but after synchronization, while in the offline mode, it appears that not all messages bodies were downloaded,

and there are no visible mark of headers without the body,

sic!

Ok, this is the end of the discussion,

after many experiments I see,

in current portable TB

there is no way to download all contents of the messages for offline use

even copy messages to local folders do not work,

who is using that email client ?