Thunderbird still sucks

The last time I used Mozilla Thunderbird it was in Windows, I was trying to stay away from Outlook. Eventually it was so infuriating that it drove me back to Outlook.

That was over two years ago.

I also tried to use Mail.app but the problem is that it doesn't play nice with Outlook. My boss uses Outlook, that means *I* have to make sure I send the emails so he can see them OK, not the other way around. There is a weird incompatibility between Mail.app and Outlook due to Unicode: sometimes Outlook can't tell that the message should be set to Unicode.

The only fix I know is to add a Unicode character to my signature, which would force the whole message to be Unicode and Outlook will see it properly.

I switched back to Mail.app a couple of months ago because I did not wanted to keep Parallels open just to reply to work email, and the Unicode signature hack more or less worked, but I found another problem: many times I was replying to emails thinking it was in rich text mode, when in reality it was sending the email in plain text, something that dear leader hates.

This week I finally broke down and tried the newest Thunderbird. To my dismay, it could not even import emails from Mail.app, and their instructions on how to do it by hand were completely and absolutely wrong. After three or four days I found a program that lets me export Mail.app mailboxes one at a time, then a Thunderbird extension that can read these exported files.

The end result? I got all 25,000 or so emails, but once again, I hate Thunderbird.

1. Search sucks.



2. The preferences suck.



3. It took me over five minutes to find out where the hell to change my signature.



4. My signature comes out as plain text no matter what. If I add html markup to it, it encodes it. If I try rich text, it encodes it.



5. No smart mailboxes!

I could go on.

I even tried Mailsmith, but it is god damn ugly, and it won't do html emails. I hate Eudora with passion, there is no way in hell I am going to use that voluntarily. And I can't use my favorite email, Gmail, because when I use impersonation Outlook says "email sent by user@gmail.com on behalf of user@domain.com."

What else is out there for 10.5? Even if it costs money, I just want something that works at least as good as Mail.app but with less html email drama.

Mozilla CEO Says Apple’s Safari ‘Update’ Undermines Users’ Trust

Whether you want it or not, you may accidentally install Apple’s Safari web browser on your computer by doing a routine update to your iTunes. That sounds strange? It is, as it seems to be a rather pushy strategy from Apple to promote their new software.

After Joe Wilcox noted in his Microsoft Watch blog yesterday that an Apple Software Update window popped on his daughter’s computer offering a Safari download as “bonus” to the regular update, talks about Apples strategy began to emerge.

Mozilla CEO John Lily noted on his blog: “What Apple is doing now with their Apple Software Update on Windows is wrong. It undermines the trust relationship great companies have with their customers, and that’s bad – not just for Apple, but for the security of the whole Web.”

[From Mozilla CEO Says Apple’s Safari ‘Update’ Undermines Users’ Trust]

Jesus Christ, would you grow a pair of balls?

Is the Apple envy in the FOSS community so bad that everyone is going to get their panties in a bunch over a god damn installer? I saw the stupid installer, it had THREE things in it:

1. iTunes



2. Quicktime



3. Safari

There is NOTHING covert or unfair about it. It has a list of three things, clearly named, and each item has a check box. No surprises there.

And how the fuck is this a security issue? Vista was a complete flop, Firefox 3 is still not out of beta, yet big hats from both camps have the time to stop their hard work (whatever the hell is it they do) to bitch and moan about a pop up with an optional download/update?

Netscape finally put to the sword - Internet - iTnews Australia

AOL has released its last ever update for Netscape Navigator and is encouraging its remaining users to switch to Flock or Firefox..

"Users will see the following major upgrade notice, released as Netscape 9.0.0.6," said Tom Drapeau, director of AOL's Netscape brand, in a company blog.

"When the Netscape 9.0.0.6 upgrade is accepted and run, the following notice will appear, denoting the end of support date and the recommendations of Flock and Firefox."

The pop-up offers users download links to a choice of the Flock or Mozilla's Firefox browser.

[From Netscape finally put to the sword - Internet - iTnews Australia]

Goodbye, funny guy. No surprise here, except why it took so damn long.