Get the latest Lightning version from AMO, it works perfectly well with TB 3.01 (even if it is still called “beta”).

About new default settings, I tend to agree with you, there are not self understanding. I believe this has been reworked for 3.1 (better explanatation, rewording…)

And about new features, that’s not fair, they are plenty of new ones, the Global search being on of the most important to me. Take a look at the Expression Search or Gmail Conversation View add-ons, made possible by this Global database, they increase mail productivity so much.

At last, TB is a real and powerful mail tool. That was not the case before.

Thanks for your hard work. I’m a big fan of the Thunderbird releases 1.0 – 2.x,. but I’m not all happy with the 3.0 release.

For the usual user, it sucks pretty much, and I’m going to point out why. Most of the users waited for a more stable and more convenient update of Thunderbird 2.x. What they got instead was a release, which had a completely modified UI, which left all logical reasoning:
* IMAP: The default setting for all IMAP severs is now, to download all messages. That’s not, what IMAP was intended to do. Even worse, this new default behavior caused our (usually Mozilla centric) company system administrators to put Thunderbird on a blacklist, because a) with several thousands eMails in your Inbox this occupies your PC for several hours and b) it’s a severe security problem for portable devices without a harddisk encryption.
* Common Inbox: Why is the Common Inbox the new default setting? Most advanced users have more than one eMail connection, which they are used to access in parallel. The UI to switch between common and separate inboxes is not obious at all, I needed hours to find out that I could click on those arrows at side of the inbox-pane…
* New behavior of message search box: It was so easy to search for the sender/addressee in the 2.x version. Now the default behavior is this new ‘advanced’ full text search, which sucks in my opinion, and it took me hours to find out how to return to the old behavior.
* Stability on Mac OS X: On my Mac Book Pro, Thunderbird 3.0.1 is highly unstable, especially after returning from sleep mode, and accessing my IMAP server via VPN. In most cases, Thunderbird is frozen, and I have to kill the old instance first before restarting.
* Lightning: I liked Lightning, but there is still no real new release available, which is compatible to Thunderbird 3.0. Can anybody at least confirm that the DB interface of the current beta is stable?
* New features: The only feature I can recognize as new and helpful is the “remind me to missing attachments” feature. Unfortunately, the reminder is highly invisible on windows, which makes the whole new feature completely useless from an end-user perspective… Why is there no UI, to enable at least the dialog-box, which would really remind me, instead of this invisible UI helper element???

Over all, I’m very disappointed about the new release, since I think the disadvantages really outweigh the few bugfixes, which seem to be incorporated. In this sense, I would have preferred to see more bugfixes in the 2.x product line, instead of an new release, where I really have problems with…