Thursday, December 09, 2004

The Blogroll's Back! Hadn't realized that there had been some changes made to the home page at some point, so the blogroll (courtesy of Bloglines) went away. So it's back now, along with a handy way to add "Notes" to your own Bloglines account. I should probably get one of those "Add to My Yahoo" buttons too. With some good fortune, this will make your visits here a tad more interesting. 10:53:11 PM    comment []

Leaving Eudora behind, or, I love my Thunderbird For nearly all my computing life, I've gotten too much email. Too many interests, too many high-traffic mailing lists, too much technology news to track than report on. And through it all, if I had Windows on the box, Eudora was there to handle my precious email load. Dating myself yet again, I got my first Internet account when I went to work for the University of Wisconsin-Madison in March 1993, and with it came that first copy of Eudora. It was so easy to use, and powerful too, and never complained about the load over my 14.4 kbps modem. Maybe it took a half hour to get the daily mail, but Eudora knew what to do with it once it got there.  I don't remember much about its features back then, but I think the ability to sort mail into folders came a little later. When I left UW for my high-tech job, Eudora followed me there. Lots of folks used Outlook, but I didn't care for it much. The rules were clunky and not always obeyed, and it just didn't  work as well on the home machine. When Qualcomm, the company that produced Eudora (and a few other thinigs as time went on), bought the naming rights to San Diego's football stadium, I took to calling it "The House That Email Built." All good things come to an end, though. The company bought an Exchange server and we all had to go to Outlook. Eudora 5 introduced the ad-supported version that I used at home, and started dealing with the spam that increasingly cluttered my Inbox and wasted my time. Except it didn't do a very good job of it, and soon stopped working on my "Sponsored" copy. For no apparent reason, my copy of Eudora would stop receiving ads and blame me for it. Known problem, new fixes from time to time, never worked permanently. By the time Eudora 6 came out, I was already looking for something that might be better. Last March, I found "better." Mozilla Thunderbird, even in its early days, did filters as well or better than Eudora did. And it handled spam pretty well too. As Thunderbird inched ever-closer to v1.0, it got even better (though I still clean a lot of spam, the false positive rate has always been negligible--a big plus!). Now it handles email, Usenet and RSS feeds natively. I haven't had time to see if it will do multiple "personalities" (addresses and signatures) as well as Eudora, but I guess that's just a matter of time. And it works in Linux too! I haven't had the heart to uninstall Eudora yet (I even update it every once in awhile), but that's probably just a matter of time too.  Most of the reviews I've read compare Thunderbird to its Microsoft counterparts (with good reason). Those of you who've loved Eudora (PC or Mac), this one's for you! 9:32:33 PM    comment []