thunderbird is a terrific mail application (“mail user agent” is the posh name, i believe).
pretty much the only thing i don’t like about it though is its way of formatting the date and time and not providing a way of letting me configure the date format via preferences. it got bad enough that i recently spent a bit of time to figure out how get thunderbird to display date and time in yyyy-MM-dd HH:MM format — that is, 2011-04-13 20:34 instead of 04/13/2011 08:34pm or something similarly silly.
the solution was hiding in a forum post on the ubuntu forum: by switching the locale (well, at least parts of it) to en_DK.utf8 thunderbird would use the yyyy-MM-dd HH:MM format (aka ISO date–time format).
here’s how i did that on ubuntu:
# first: create a diversion of the normal /usr/bin/thunderbird
dpkg-divert --divert /usr/bin/thunderbird.ubuntu --rename --local --add /usr/bin/thunderbird
# next: create our locale setting wrapper
cat <<HERE >/usr/bin/thunderbird
#!/bin/bash
export LC_TIME=en_DK.utf8
export LC_PAPER=en_DK.utf8
export LC_MEASUREMENT=en_DK.utf8
exec /usr/bin/thunderbird.ubuntu "$@"
HERE
chmod a+x /usr/bin/thunderbird
that should do the trick.
