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  • Andrew 5:36 PM on July 25, 2006 Permalink
    Tags: Email, Mozilla, Thunderbird   

    Best Email Client Ever. Period. 

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    No really… This time I mean it!

    I had written previously about Outlook being the gold standard for connectivity to all manner of smartphones; that’s still true, but I have to confess that Outlook’s shiny bells and whistles momentarily blinded me to the danger of its proprietary database format for storing my precious messages. And no sooner did I publish my gushing review when Outlook gave me a warning that my ten-year archive of saved email was in danger of being corrupted!

    As the saying goes, fool me once…

    Thunderbird has the distinct advantage of being the only email client available for Linux, Mac and Windows. If that’s not good enough for you, here are some specific reasons why it’s better than what you’re using right now:

    1. If you’re using Gmail, don’t be so smug… Big Brother is watching you!
    2. If you’re using Hotmail, Yahoo! or some other web-based client, whatcha gonna do when you’re mailbox is full, or when the powers that be decide to start charging you for reading your own messages?
    3. If you’re using Outlook Express for Windows or Mac, you’re just asking for trouble…
    4. If you’re using Eudora, be warned that it severs the attachments from your messages and puts them in a separate directory—changing your machine or even the name of your hard drive might forever break the link between the two!
    5. If you’re using Apple Mail, you’ll be disappointed that you won’t be able to search your messages from the other overpriced Macs on your network… Or easily migrate to Thunderbird when the other cool kids do it!
    6. If you’re using Outlook proper, you’d better have an Exchange Server along with an IT department to clean up the mess you’re gonna make. Oh, and prepare to defend yourself against the bulk of the internet’s malicious email attacks…
    7. And if you’re using Evolution, KMail or some other Linux email client you’d best get your ass out to the sauna and check on that fondue, ya damned hippie!

    Okay, I’ll admit that I know little or nothing about those last two, but all my other reasons for switching to Thunderbird are valid. I really do have an archive of saved email that reaches back into the last millennium, so I speak from experience when I say this:

    For once and future emails, Thunderbird is king!

     

    • Michelle 12:48 PM on July 26, 2006 Permalink | Reply

      Agreed. After much pissing and moaning, I switched over to Thunderbird about a year ago, and I’ve never been happier with a program. I like that it saves my email contacts even when I forget to!

    • Rick 1:22 PM on July 27, 2006 Permalink | Reply

      I had to wonder what you were smokin’ with that endorsement of Outlook but politely backed away. I’ve been using Thunderbird for about three years now and love it. Watch out where you store your local mail I prefer not to use “my documents” or maybe it was the c:programs which was I think the default … and I got confused when I got a new computer.

      But it’s very solid, I taught it what to delete as Junk, and it manages all my accounts from one place. Gold!

    • Ed Miller 4:59 PM on July 31, 2006 Permalink | Reply

      AC:
      I, too, will be switching from Apple Mail to Thunderbird, once I get my Dell moved over to Linux….

      Ed

  • Andrew 6:19 AM on February 24, 2006 Permalink
    Tags: , Email   

    BlackBerry Therapy 

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    For all you CrackBerry addicts and RIM stockholders out there here’s a little humour courtesy of The Onion, to help ease you through the possible shutdown of service later today. One thing they forgot: Set up your PC in the bathroom so you can email on the toilet just like you did with your BlackBerry!

    I still don’t see what the big deal is with a device that has no camera and only one lousy game; there are lots of other handhelds out there that can do push email, and you all know which one’s my favourite…
    8-)

     

  • Andrew 12:23 PM on November 7, 2005 Permalink
    Tags: Email   

    The Email Time Capsule 

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    Forbes Magazine is, for some unknown reason, sponsoring what they’re calling an Email Time Capsule. Until November 30th, you can send a message to yourself to be delivered anywhere from one to twenty years in the future. Forbes have partnered with Yahoo! and another company to ensure triple redundancy for the message database… Just make sure the address that you choose for yourself will be still be around by the time your email gets delivered!

    My message to my future self? “Stay the course, Currie… You’re doing super!”
    8-)

     

    • Ed Miller 3:10 PM on November 7, 2005 Permalink | Reply

      AC:

      I was going to send myself an e-mail saying that George W. Bush is an idiot, but I’d be afraid that in 2025 President Jenna Bush would bar me from entering the U.S….

      Ed

    • Wong Hu 8:30 PM on November 9, 2005 Permalink | Reply

      I think I’m going to send myself an e-mail telling me to start living in the real world and start reading Fortune Magazine in 20 years.

  • Andrew 10:39 PM on August 9, 2005 Permalink
    Tags: , Email   

    BlackBerry DeBunked 

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    A recent billing issue with my beloved Fido had me briefly looking into the possibility of replacing my hiptop with Canada’s own smartphone success story, the CrackBerry. Both my brothers and one of my sisters-in-law have one, and after thumbing around on them and doing a bit of research I think I’m able to speak with some authority on the subject…

    I’ll cut to the chase here: Business-types love their Blackberries because of the BlackBerry Enterprise Server software that comes with it. For as little as $5000 CAD, up to twenty users can enjoy the same wireless syncing of calendar, contacts and email that my hiptop gives me for free.

    Regular self-employed schmucks like myself must settle for the BlackBerry Internet Service, which gives you an “@bell/rogers/telus.blackberry.net” email address and a smartphone without a camera or MP3 player that you have sync manually with your computer just like anything else. Woo.

    Oh, and the only unlimited BB data plan that I can find in Canada costs $60/month and isn’t really unlimited!

     

  • Andrew 11:16 PM on May 19, 2005 Permalink
    Tags: , Email   

    All About Email for Mac OS X 

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    So I’ve upgraded my late-model Powerbook to Tiger, and I’ve decided also to give Apple’s built-in Mail app one more chance. Switching email programs is a risky business—different products store messages on you computer in fundamentally different ways. I myself have been burned more than once, so please allow me to share what I’ve learned…

    The email apps that I’ve encountered use one of three basic filesystems: Databases, Mbox and Emix.

    Databasics

    These include Microsoft Entourage and Bare Bones’ Mailsmith. I jumped on board with Entourage as soon as I got my copy of the Office 2001 Suite for Mac; though its email functionality is no different than the Mac version of Outlook Express, Entourage could sync my addresses, calendar events and other good stuff with my Palm PDA. The arrangement worked out perfectly, until some cheap RAM on my computer corrupted my mail database, and destroyed all the email I had accrued since my last backup.

    Entourage stores your mail in a proprietary database, which you can only access using Entourage. You can compact it, rebuild it and sometimes even repair it from within the program, but if something bad ever happens then there’s little you can do. To be fair, you can export your mail into other readable formats, but if you can’t easily re-import them then what’s the point?

    I’ve also downloaded a 30-day trial of Mailsmith, but trashed it as soon as I realized that it too stored mail in a proprietary database. Fool me once…

    Enter the Mbox

    After my Entourage email disaster, I found myself reunited with an old friend called Eudora. Eudora uses the “mbox” format, just like Mozilla and Thunderbird. The big advantage here is that these mboxes are more or less text files, readable by any word processor. I’ve got archived Eudora mail from eight years ago, and I can still open it with my current version without issue. I can even open a Eudora mailbox in another computer across a network, with the necessary permissions, of course—and that’s pretty cool!

    Sadly, Eudora’s interface is anything but. It hasn’t changed all that much since I first started using it, and with Mac OS X’s shiny new buttons it looks downright hideous. So I decided to give Jaguar’s built-in Mail program a try…

    Version 1 of Apple’s Mail app also stores mail in mbox format, but with separate preferences and other proprietary files added to the mix. One day I booted up my mail program and got a message that one of these files was corrupt, and that was that. All my mail, gone. I suspect that Apple’s mbox files weren’t really up to standards, as I had a 3MB one sitting on my computer that I couldn’t do a thing with. So back I ran into Eudora’s ugly embrace.

    Emixology

    Arguably Apple’s most innovative new feature in its Tiger OS is Spotlight, giving the user the ability to quickly find anything on the computer, including specific email messages. To accomplish this, version 2 of Apple Mail stores each individual message as a separate file, with .emix suffix tacked on to the end. Certainly not your standard file extension, but it works—I’ve tried searching for obscure keywords hidden deep in long emails, and Spotlight has caught each and every one.

    For this alone I’m willing to give Apple Mail another chance. If something goes wrong you’ll be sure to hear about it here. In the meantime, if you’re using or thinking of switching to one of the other products mentioned above, hopefully you can learn from my pain and not repeat any of my mistakes!

     

    • Brett Ellis 6:45 PM on May 28, 2005 Permalink | Reply

      I have also recently gave mail a second chance because its searching ability is so much better than entourage. And now that mail stores each of the individual mails also individual files you can attach spotlight tags which makes it nice for managing projects. I setup project folders inside mail.app and now have automator tag emails within those particlar folders (libray/mail/….) and now can just spotlight a particular project title and everything comes up. Very handy.

    • Andrew Currie 10:01 PM on May 28, 2005 Permalink | Reply

      Hiya Brett… Thanks for the comment!

      Yeah, I’ve been leaving my email on my POP servers while giving Mail.app another chance, and I think it’s ready for prime time. Here’s hoping, anyway…

    • Diego Zamboni 8:17 AM on May 30, 2005 Permalink | Reply

      Nice post. W.r.t. switching mail programs, for me the ideal solution has been to keep my own IMAP server. Even for a single machine, having a local IMAP server means your email can be stored there, and you can use pretty much any (modern) client to access it.

      I’ve used this mostly on my work Linux machine, because at home (which is where I use my Mac) I have a separate email server. I have put the instructions here: http://www.zzamboni.org/brt/2005/01/31/12/

      I’ve also managed to compile and use dovecot on MacOS X – I may add some notes about that soon.

    • Andrew Currie 11:36 AM on May 30, 2005 Permalink | Reply

      A local IMAP server? Wow. I’m guessing you can’t do that with Mac OS X without opening a terminal window…
      ;)

      I should probably point out that most of my actual day to day emailing happens with my hiptop handheld—I just need to know that when I archive my POP mail on my Mac it’ll be both readable and safe for the future.

    • James Kahan 11:39 PM on June 1, 2005 Permalink | Reply

      For those of you who like to glue everything together (myself included) you should try CRM4MAC. It seems to be closest thing out there to the entourage linking feature.

    • Chris Hart 7:16 AM on July 23, 2005 Permalink | Reply

      I feel the need to defend Microsoft Entourage. I’m a Mac consultant and I have experience with all the popular email clients on the mac. On my own computer I have to deal with high volumes of email. For many years I used Claris Emailer, then MS Outlook Express and then eventually migrated to MS Entourage. As I said, I’ve dealt with all the email apps for Mac, and I consider Entourage the best choice for email. Yes, the program has had its problems and yes your email database can become corrupted. However, this corruption typically only happens when there is a problem with your computer (usually the kind that cause hard crashes—requiring a forced restart). In my experience, however, Entourage problems are rare and it’s generally very reliable. And, as with anything else to do with computers, having proper backups is essential! I have little sympathy for computer users who do not backup regularly. If you can afford to lose a week’s worth of email, then backup weekly. If you’re like me, however, and you’ll lose valuable time and information by having just a day’s worth of email evaporate, then you should be backing up daily. There are countless ways to automate backups, so there is no excuse not to have such a procedure in place.

    • Chris Hart 12:48 PM on July 23, 2005 Permalink | Reply

      By the way, Entourage that comes with Office 2001, Office X and Office 2004 for Mac all export their message folders in teh MBOX format. And it couldn’t be simpler: you just drag the email folder of messages to your desktop (or a particular folder) and voila you have an MBOX archive. Similarly, you can import MBOX archives into Entourage by just dragging them into the list of email folders.

    • Andrew Currie 4:38 PM on July 24, 2005 Permalink | Reply

      Thanks for the comments, Chris—though I have to disagree on one point…

      Archiving Entourage mail should be easier than dragging individual mailboxes out of the Entourage window and on to the desktop, IMHO. I believe that a truly trustworthy email app will store its native mail files on my hard drive in a format readable by any text editor.

      To be fair, I’ve heard that Entourage databases can be opened by BBEdit… Anyone out there ever tried it?

    • Chris Hart 3:44 PM on August 1, 2005 Permalink | Reply

      Yes, Entourage’s database can be opened in ANY text editor.

    • Andrew Currie 10:34 PM on August 1, 2005 Permalink | Reply

      Right you are, Chris—I just gave it a try, though casual users should be warned: What you get ain’t pretty!

    • Andrew Currie 3:07 AM on August 4, 2005 Permalink | Reply

      On the subject of databases, I’m curious… Has anyone out there ever had a corrupted mail database in outlook/outlook express for windows? Are such things common? Fixable?

    • Hoa TRAN 9:01 AM on August 14, 2005 Permalink | Reply

      Use same Entourage database from different Macs in home OSX Server network: Our family shares different Macs at home. Since we don’t have a dedicated machine for each, anyone could be logging on from any machine.
      Will Entourage work off the same Microsoft User folder on the server (User’s Home folder), if I put an alias to it on all the other (client) machines? The intent being, whether I log on the machine running the server software, or another one, when I fire up Entourage I’ll be looking at the same database (mail messages, contacts, calendar appointments).
      Will a plain alias work, or a symlink?

    • Julian Beckett 11:42 AM on September 7, 2005 Permalink | Reply

      I’m still waiting for Outlook OS X and a pukka Exchange connector…aah the bliss of properly automated back-ups and archive.pst files etc, etc, etc….

    • Lakatos Laszlo Says: 9:16 PM on October 24, 2005 Permalink | Reply

      Dont trust Mail, Andrew. I’ve just lost my Inbox messages. They are there, but dont show up. The window says: “O messages, 12 unread”. An i am not the only one. See this: http://www.macintouch.com/mail.app18.html#oct21

    • Andrew Currie 11:34 AM on October 25, 2005 Permalink | Reply

      Ouch! Sorry for your loss…

      Are you using Mail 2.0, the one that came with Tiger? I believe that it’s more reliable than version 1.x, as it stores each message to a separate file. This is good because I’ve had to re-index my messages on one occasion, and everything came back. The problem, BTW, was caused by a third-party HTTPMail plug-in for Hotmail:

      http://www.automagic-software.com/products.php

      … Which you certainly don’t need in Entourage!

      If my experience with Apple Mail 2.0 changes, rest assured that I’ll post about it here!

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