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!

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…

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!”

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!

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!