When comparing Mozilla Thunderbird vs Miranda, the Slant community recommends Miranda for most people. In the question“What are the best XMPP clients for Windows?” Miranda is ranked 1st while Mozilla Thunderbird is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose Miranda is:
Very light on system resources and extremely fast, Miranda IM requires no installation and can be made to fit on a single floppy disk or USB drive.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Free (as in freedom and beer)
Pro Available on Linux, OS X and Windows
Pro Good filtering system
Mozilla Thunderbird offers a flexible filtering system with the ability to set flags and read/unread, as well as sort/assign to new mail directories. There are also numerous plugins available to assist in the filtering.
Pro Very reliable
Version after version, Mozilla Thunderbird works as expected.
Pro Large assortment of plugins available
Mozilla Thunderbird offers a huge amount of extensions to expand the usability and options of the client.
Pro Great flexibility
More options and extended settings than most power users could dream of. Get it working how YOU want.
Pro Tabs for navigation
Pro Lightning Calendar and Address Book integration
Pro Consistent and involving a moderate learning curve
The app design of Mozilla Thunderbird has not changed significantly since its beginning, making its learning curve almost non-existent.
Pro Send large files easy
Install pCloud plugin for Thunderbird and your files (upto 20 GB free storage included) will be received as download links
Pro Requires no installation and is very lightweight
Very light on system resources and extremely fast, Miranda IM requires no installation and can be made to fit on a single floppy disk or USB drive.
Pro Insanely customisable
You can see all the plugins available for Miranda here.
Cons
Con Development slowed to only focus on stability and security
Mozilla Thunderbird has slowed down its development of features to only focus resources on security and stability.
Con Outdated interface
Thunderbird's interface is very outdated and unpleasant. It feels more like a Windows XP application than like a modern MacOS one.
Con Terrible integration with macOS
Simple things - drag/dropping pictures doesn't work, for instance.
Con Subject lines can (temporarily) disappear from the list
This is sporadic behavior.
Con Serious bugs
Clicking on a subject line can bring up the wrong email.
Con Outdated XMPP Support
Missing OMEMO, Carbon Copy, HTTP-Upload ...
Con Does not support BOSH
Con OMEMO supported
