Category: Us

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

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.

Olympic moment: the Women’s Biathlon

Last night we watched the Magdalena Neuner of Germany win the Women’s Biathlon at the Vancouver games.  I have only three questions about this event:

  1. With all of those guns, if someone is in front of you, can you shoot them to get ahead?  After all, this is a competition?
  2. With all of those guns, where were all of the Americans?  Not a single one apparently was in the final.  In fact, it seems that this is a Russo-European race.  Four continents went completely unrepresented.
  3. With all of those guns, where the heck was James Bond?  I kept expecting to seem him cut across the track, while all the competitors from Eastern Europe started aiming at him.  THAT would have been entertainment.

(I have no idea why we watched this particular event.  We’d just finished watching Slum Dog Millionaire for the first time.  That was good.)

Grant Us Peace

I suspect we Americans all have very different emotions.  Rather than express mine in my usual verbose way, I’ll simply write two things: my thoughts are with my cousins who lost a father, a brother, and a spouse eight years ago this day.  Their grief is only compounded this week with another loss last week.  My thoughts are with them.  They’re also with my aunt who lost her closest friend, and with my brother and sister who bore witness, and all those suffered losses.

I’ll also just mention some of today’s play list (if you can figure out what most of these songs have to do with this day, you probably are or should be a shrink):

Please share your songs and thoughts.