Thank you Thunderbird!
Hitting send, Thunderbird’s spell checker came up as my wife had typed “impass” instead of “impasse” in a recent email. Of course the pre-selected choice for correcting the word was the proper one, but there was a second choice available—one that made Tammy & I guffaw: “imp ass“.
I almost snarfed coffee when I read this bit in an article relating to Microsoft’s objection to a pillow and quilt manufacturer in Australia registering the Trademark “Microsoft” in their particular goods class. (emphasis mine)
“I don’t think anyone is going to shove a pillow into a computer…
“In his ruling on August 11, 1997, Ian Forno, the hearing officer, observed, in part: “The opponent (Microsoft) does not appear from the evidence to have had any reputation for padding, stuffing and filling materials, as at the date of the present mark’s application. There has been no evidence put forward by the opponent to show any instances of deception caused by the use of applicant’s mark.”
Yeah, thats why 600 MB of email took up 2.25 GB when it was stored in Outlook.
Purax Feather Holdings — the pillow and quilt company — bills Microsoft in this way: Our exclusive new non allergenic and thoroughly hygienic Polyester Fibre “Microsoft” ensures a luxurious nights sleep,
No way is there going to be any confusion there—Microsoft software has caused too many nights of missed sleep for me in the past years of supporting it professionally.
Otherwise, essentially an unremarkable news story about the trademark process working exactly as it is supposed to. Or maybe that is somewhat remarkable after all?
Moved the very last message from Outlook’s perverted .pst files to the IMAP(Internet Message Access Protocol) server I setup. Finally I am totally rid of Microsoft’s Office suite. Outlook I was tied to because of a ton of old email’s that I do sometimes use and need access to. The were all store in the proprietary format Microsoft uses in their .pst files, and I could never find a suitably strong enough program to import and translate those files including sub-folders and attachments.
Fed up at last with the upgrade price of Office 2003, I set up an IMAP server on the internal network. I now have almost 2.75 GB(Gigabytes) of space back on my drive from removing office and those bloated Microsoft message stores. The exact same e-mails that took up 2.25GB are taking up less than 600 MB(MegaBytes) on the IMAP server. Does that make sense? Yes, I checked that the message counts matched and spot checked messages all throughout the files, ditto attachments. Everything is there, it just not stored in a bloated fashion.
I still haven’t settled on a new email client. I am grabbing the latest Thunderbird weekly right now, and I will be looking into Mozilla as well. Right now I am just reveling in un-chained freedom—ok maybe that’s a bit much, but still…
Edit (Aug 2006): For those seeking a replacement to the libpst based ol2mbox — now a dead project — for converting Outlook pst message stores to mbox format, I discovered a program called ReadPST (scroll down to “Mailbox Conversion”) while looking for the easiest way to move old messages to Gmail. No guarantees…I’ve not used it, but I get a lot of visits from people looking to convert outlook PST to mBox….
Well, I tried intraVnews for over a week, and it is the best Outlook based RSS feed reader I’ve yet to use, but….
As the number of subscriptions increased so did the memory use and periodic unresponsiveness of Outlook. Not bad unresponsiveness, but enough to interrupt when I was composing an email—stalled for 30 seconds or so every 5–10 minutes. In fairness to intraVnews, my Outlook has far too many .pst files and many of them are much larger than I am comfortable with. Some of the issues with unresponsiveness may be the intraVnews interacts with Outlook folders. All I know is that with intraVnews removed, the memory usage has been acceptable—well, back to bloated code acceptable at least—and there have been no stalls.
As I said originally, I continued to use FeedDemon as my primary reader, and now it is back to the only one on my system. Along with the upcoming (?)support for Atom feeds in FeedDemon, I would like to see some of the features of intraVnews added into it—primarily the secure feed option. That was my main reason to keep intraVnews on the system for the past week. I read all the secure feeds in intraVnews twice a day in Outlook, just for the auto-login to secure feeds. At the same time I moved those feeds to an un-used channel group in FeedDemon to keep them available but not prompting me for my credentials every time I updated my “Daily Read” channel group.
On the Outlook front, one of the things I installed on the web server was an IMAP server just so that I could migrate all my .pst files to Thunderbird or Mozilla‘s mail. I’m not sure which of those I will be using yet. My primary requirements are multi-account handling, advanced filtering capabilities, 3 panel reader and use of non-proprietary mail and attachment storage. Then I can ditch Microsoft Office for good.
Eclectic Echoes is Stephen Fry proof thanks to caching by WP Super Cache