grack.com

I found a particularily amusing comment in my earlier Thunderbird article:

You seem to know the Thunderbird developers by name, which makes your post quite biased, but comparing Outlook to Thunderbird is like comparing USA to Afghanistan in military power. At least be reasonable and compare it with Outlook Express. The bias you guys are expressing makes mozilla look like a toy without much substance.

You got to shows some honesty somewhere if you want to build real relationships with customers and users. Outlook is a platform, there are tons of useful programs that extend Outlook in anyway they want. Thunderbird is more like a simple program and has its own competitors in the shareware business. There are many shareware programs which is faster and better than Thunderbird, yet you pick Outlook as competitor. Most probably you want to gain sympathy, but believe me every company that does that goes out of business sooner or later. You got to innovate, instead of cry.

Unfortunately, Outlook Express isn’t a fair comparison.  It would easily take a beating when stacked up to Thunderbird’s features, stability, UI and speed.  I might be deluged with comments saying “try Outlook instead!” 

As much as I’d like to say that I’m “in” with the Thunderbird developers, I’m just an outsider that’s been keeping an eye on Thunderbird for a while.  Anyone who’s scanned the Thunderbird forums would know who mscott is.  I’ve also been using Mozilla Mail for about four years before my Thunderbird switch. 

I’m sorry to say that no, I haven’t had any experience with any of the Windows shareware mail programs out there.  There was a period of about a week that I used The Bat! in the 90’s, but I was using Outlook at the time and it didn’t fit the bill.  Other than that, nothing.  I use Evolution on my Linux box at home, though I’m considering a switch to Thunderbird there as well (if only for Evolution’s VFolders in Thunderbird!)

I stand by my previous glowing review of Thunderbird.  It’s small, fast and looks like a modern email client should.  It’s also dog-easy to extend via XUL and Javascript- something that Outlook Express sorely lacks (there you go - I compared with OE).  If I somehow find myself lacking a certain feature in the future, I might just try my hand at extending it.

BTW, the Macro Editor and XULMaker extensions might be an interesting thing to try.  Perhaps another day.

Okay, I’ll admit it.  My mind is racing with extension ideas right now.  May as well dump one here for future reference.

So, here’s my cool extension idea: take all of the bookmarks in the browser and sync them with a central server via a webservice.  Allow deep custom categorization of bookmarks and keep the folder structure on the server.  For extra credit, archive a current copy of the page for future reference if the page goes away.  If you have extra time, write an IE plugin (or external program) that does the same thing.

Now, where to host such a webservice?

It took me a while to figure something out that works, but I’ve figured out a way to organize my filters in Thunderbird.  Since I have something like 40 rules, editing and understanding them was started to become difficult. 

My solution?  I started adding fake filters as separator lines between the groups of filters.  They now look like this:

--- People Filters ---
Person A
Person B
--- Mailing Lists ---
List A
List B
--- Miscellaneous ---
Spam
Viruses

I would love to have filter folders or some other form of hierarchical organization, but this will do for now. It’s much easier to understand your filters when you can see them executing as a block of similar filter types. I prefer my people filters to execute first, followed by mailing lists and opt-in notifications (bank, Yahoo, Google, etc.) and, finally, my SpamAssassin-tagged-message rule filters.

Wow.  You can run this script to automatically install IE6 in Linux. 

Vivendi Universal is releasing, for free (gratis), two of my favorite games ever: Tribes 1 & 2.  This release is geared at getting games’ juices fired up in anticipation of Tribes 3. 

I’m glad to see that people realize that freeing abandonware can be useful.