IPv6 and Thunderbird

I've been using Microsoft Outlook at work for a few years. The company uses Lotus Notes for email, but Notes sucks rocks, so I chucked that a few years ago. Outlook is pretty good, but has one or two little things that annoy me, so I thought I'd give Mozilla Thunderbird a try, since I love Firefox so much. Well, everything was going along just swimmingly, and then I tried sending an email to someone who wasn't in my address book. It tried to connect to our LDAP server, and the whole program hung for about 5 seconds, and didn't find anything. I did some more tests, and still had no luck with LDAP. I tried to install Thunderbird a couple of years ago, and ran into the same problem, but I figured it was a bug in Thunderbird, since it was version 0.8 or something at the time. I assumed that since it's up to version 1.5 now, the bug would have been fixed.

I sent an email around to the department, asking if anyone else was using Thunderbird, and several people are, none of whom are having the same LDAP problems. Out of the blue, I suddenly wondered if IPv6 was related, since it seemed to be a networking issue, and I am probably one of the only people in engineering with IPv6 installed. I went to my second machine, which also had Thunderbird installed, and I saw the same problem. I uninstalled IPv6, rebooted the machine, and the problem vanished. I did another search on BugZilla, this time including IPv6 in the search criteria, and found the problem -- LDAP doesn't work if IPv6 is installed.

I briefly thought about downloading the Thunderbird source and development environment and attempting to find and fix the bug, but I don't know when the hell I'd have time to do it. I'll just have to stick with Outlook until the bug is fixed.