by flamewar, i just meant the regular usenet thing... such as kelley's criticism of my post as "Just waving your hand" (hand-waving: Usually insubstantial words or actions intended to convince or impress: resorted to hand waving instead of arguing rationally. from dictionary.com). i don't think she (or i or you) is/are "inflamed" but this sort of thing often leads to a flamewar, which would be a bit of a waste, since i was not pushing any ideology/philosophy (note: i have to reiterate that a flamewar on the net can be an entertaining and light-hearted thing).
> I am really curious though as to what the supposed merely personal
> advantages of Mozilla Thunderbird are. Jan switched to it from Outlook,
> and I can see how that would be fine. But I tried switching to it from
> Netscape 4.7 and am probably going to switch back to Netscape from the
> absence of a number of favorite features in Thunderbird.
thunderbird+firefox/mozilla should support almost all the features of netscape 4.7 (the only one that i can think of, that is missing, is roaming profiles). additionally, it provides: (1) multiple and mixed POP/IMAP mail servers, (2) junk mail filtering that is quite accurate, (3) finer controls on mail content, such as disabling javascript, (3) message labelling, with colour, (4) mail filters, (5) PGP integration, if you are so inclined, using enigmail, for mail authenticiy(signing)/security(encryption), (6) various useful UI features/improvements (e.g. adding addresses in mail headers to addressbook).
mozilla/firefox provide a host of new features over netscape 4.7: 1) better HTML4 support, 2) almost complete CSS1 and CSS2 compliance (crucial for style layout for many modern web sites), 3) tabbed browsing, 4) fine-tuned cookie (spyware) management, 5) password/form management, 6) popup blocking. to just mention a few.
--ravi