Author: Eliot

Update on Mail Saga

After a week’s worth of effort I’m coming to conclude that Thunderbird is still the best thing on the Mac, which quite frankly is sad.  The Mac pioneered Multimeda, and yet any serious attempt to use Mail as a multimedia UI is met with an obstinate user interface.  I’m not saying it’s impossible, just difficult to use.

On the other hand, I’ve found a very uncomfortable yet okay approach to dealing with Thunderbird’s breakage: have the compose font set to be “Variable Width”.  I can’t stand the font, but it is what it is, and it doesn’t change in the middle of a paragraph.

A few people have asked me why I even bother with a mail UI, as opposed to Web Mail interfaces.  The answer is two-fold:

  • I want access to at least some of my mail off-line.
  • For work I would have to go through any number whoops essentially to establish a WebMail interface that I like that ran under a web server on my laptop.  It’s not an outrageous idea, but it is a lot of work, and it’s a lot of work I shouldn’t have to do.

And so I will get by with Thunderbird, but I do think, as one of my other friends pointed out, that there’s a potential business opportunity for someone who actually WANTS to send multimedia inline HTML.

It’s also time to make a donation to the Mozilla Foundation.  I paid absolutely nothing for the use of Thunderbird and Firefox, and both are still the best things going, in spite of their warts, and let’s face it: I’m a pretty demanding customer.  Are you?

Mail Programs: Time for a Change?

It used to be the case many years ago that I would try just about any E-mail program that came into the market.  To give you some idea, here are some of the mail programs I have used:

  1. MM (TOPS-20)
  2. BABYL (TOPS-20)
  3. Mail (VMS)
  4. Mail (UCB)
  5. Mailx (UNIX System V)
  6. MUSH
  7. Mutt
  8. Elm
  9. Pine
  10. Babyl (GNU Emacs)
  11. VM (GNU Emacs)
  12. Z-Mail (A Program written by Dan Heller based on MUSH, probably the first pseudo-graphical MIME program)
  13. Andrew (CMU)
  14. dmail (written by Matt Dillon)
  15. Some really zippy MMDF mail program
  16. MM (Columbia University)
  17. Outlook
  18. Outlook Express
  19. Eudora
  20. MH
  21. Mozilla
  22. and for about the last eight years: Thunderbird

Thunderbird has been great to me.  For one thing, it’s had a very extensible architecture that has lasted quite some time, with plugins and everything.  For another, it’s done quite well handling the gigabytes of mail that I process.  The filter systems are reasonably flexible and it supported client-side certificates when I needed them.

Eight years for me is a pretty good run.  I am, however, noticing that my trusty Thunderbird is showing its age and I really have run out of time to help (not that I really helped much anyway).  For one thing:

  • Later versions try to index my entire collection of mailboxes (all 50GB of them) and this never completes.
  • The composition component is no longer sufficient to my needs.  It’s not handling fonts correctly when I wish to send multi-media messaging.

And so I ponder a change.  The question is, “to what?”  Apart from all of my needs above, I have one more need: to be able to migrate from what ever I migrate to.  This probably isn’t a problem, because one can always use IMAP copying in the worst of cases, but that can be slow.

First task, of course will be reducing what I can to ease transition.  Wish me luck and do let me know what mail program you like, these days.

The Answer Key to Bearded Hippy Bingo

According to my notes from the program, here are the answers to who is in this picture:

Row 0:

Rick Adams, Eric Allman, Ken Arnold, Fuat Baran, John Bashinsky, Steve Bellovin , Michael Berch, Scott Bradner, Keith Bostic, Dave Borman, Geoff Peck, Jeff Poskanzer, Chris Torek

Row 1:

Russell Brand, TP Brisco, Pat Caruthers, Bill Cattey, Donald (Brent) Chapman, Greg Chesson, Bill Cheswick, Don Coleman, Hugh Daniel, Owen Delong, Dorothy Nelson, Rehmi Post, Paul Pomes, Paul Traina

Row 2:

Judy DesHarnais, Marc Donner, Mark Epstein, Erik Fair, Paul Evans, Tom Ferrin, Donnalyn Frey, Mike Gallaher, John Gilmore, Ed Gould, Paul Graham, John Quarterman, Paul Vixie

Row 3:

Chris Guthrie, J. Storrs Hall (JoSH), Dan Heller, Kee Hinkley, Brian Holt, Peter Honeyman, Don Hopkins, Mark Horten, Andrew Hume, Ole Jacobsen, Elaine, Richards, Mary Riendeau, Rob Warnock

Row 4:

R. Curtis Jackson, Brian Kantor, Tom Kessler, Bery Kercheval, Chris Kent, Karl Kleinpaste, Doug Kingston, Rob Kolstad, David Korn, Eric Lavitsky, Eliot Lear, Greg Rose, Peter Salus, Saul Wold

Row 5:

Marcus Leech, Evelyn Leeper, Mark Leeper, Craig Leres, Tony Li, Mark Lotter, Barry Lustig, John Mashey, Elizabeth Zwicky, Mark Mellis, Henry Mensch, Dennis Ritchie, Donn Seeley, Pat Wilson

Row 6:

Keith Moore, Jeff Mogul, Rich Morin, Ron Natalie, Evi Nemeth, Landon Noll, Mike O’Dell, Tim O’Reilly, Jeff Okomoto, Bob Page, Andrew Partan, Barry Shein, Len Tower

Row 7:

Peter Shipley, Melinda Shore, Keith Sklower, Tim Smith, Liz Sommers, Bill Sommerfeld, Bill Stewart, Dave Taylor, David Tilbrook, Jim Thompson, Greg Woods

More lies from the lying liars who tell them

Some time ago, now Senator Al Franken wrote a book called Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.  I read the book, and found it to be a lousy read as petty, spiteful, and true.  You may not agree with his politics or his style, but the one thing you can say about Senator Franken is that he has always valued the truth.  On the other hand, I don’t know why anyone actually believes Fox News at all.  Because they and their chief liar Bill O’Reilly are at it again!  This time, it’s a railroad job against Senator Coburn, who had the audacity to call my Congresswoman, Nancy Pelosi, a nice lady, and who said, when talking abut the insane notion of putting people in prison for buying insurance, that “The intention is not to put anybody in jail. That makes for good TV news on FOX but that isn’t the intention.”

Bill O’Reilly can’t have that, so he claimed, “We researched on Fox News if anybody had ever said you’re going to jail if you don’t buy health insurance. Nobody’s ever said it.”  Guess what?  The New York Times did some investigating and found at least six instances where someone on Fox News  did say it.

When reporter at the New York Times was caught some months ago for plagiarizing, he was forced to resign and the entire newspaper was shamed.  Not so for Fox when they just make stuff up, as apparently they have no shame!  And so I think they deserve a new name: The Republican Liars Network (RCN).  Not all Republicans are liars, and not all liars are Republicans, but those who choose to believe what they know to be lies, aren’t much better than the liars themselves, especially when they act on that information in the voting booth.

All I can ask is please, Senator Franken, don’t update your book.  There’s just too much material.

How many of these people do you know?

Update!  One additional person (don’t know how I missed him the first time around).

Let’s play Bearded Hippy Bingo!  Check out this photo and see who you recognize.  Drop a comment if you have a guess.  I’ll post the answers in a few days.  Clicking on the image should enlarge it.