How can I go back to Thunderbird 2.0

Thunderbird 3.0 was eagerly awaited by millions of Thunderbird fans, and it looked all shiny and new when it arrived. Now that it's being used however, a number of flaws and bugs have been revealed, resulting in instability, crashes and a rather severe loss of confidence.

I'm counting myself lucky that my email is all hosted by Google Apps, and can thus use the excellent web interface, which also works offline thanks to Google Gears

My email account currently holds 3G of email, so maybe the size was choking Thunderbird 3.0, but whatever the case, it was unusable. Opening it after the account was setup simply resulted in it grinding to a halt within seconds, using up massive amounts of CPU, and never recovering, even after hours.

My laptop is running an Intel T9550, with 4G of RAM and Win 7 Ultimate 64-bit, so should be capable enough.

Well after a fair bit of searching I finally found a download site that still contains Thunderbird 2.0

http://files.brothersoft.com/chat_e-mail/e-mail_client/Thunderbird_Setup...
After installing, you can upgrade to the latest 2.0.23 using the CHECK FOR UPDATES menu.

Portable Apps also have an old 2.0 version available
http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/thunderbird_portable/localization#...

So now I have good old TB2 back on board, and will wait a while longer before jumping to TB3