Thunderbird 2 RoXx

[tcremer]

I've never been a big fan of POP email.. Well never since a harddrive crash in the late 90s left me without all my precious emails I'd been saving. So I headed out to the wild web and have been using webmail ever since. It's more than served my needs and then when Gmail came along, life was fantastic.

When I started work here in Illinois I decided to give Thunderbird a go since I needed something to access my POP work email account. Yeah, I could use Gmail to fetch the mail for me now but I like keeping work and personal business separate. Anyways... The more I used it, the more I adored that there weren't any "Loading..." screens, weren't any page refreshes, weren't any waiting for the Internet to push me my bits. I can work online. I can work offline albeit that I don't think I ever use a computer that's isn't web enabled.

I also love the Lightning extension which I have sync to my Google Calendar and love the Minimize to Tray extension so I can tuck TB outta sight when I'm not interested in it.

Many of you know that I'm also a big fan of RSS feeds and have used Google Reader since it was first launched. But with the improved feed handling in TB I've lost interest in the former. Again, the only delay in reading feeds is how fast TB and my 'puter can dish them up -- no waiting for the pages to load and the like. Only downside is that I can't share certain feeds with people like I do with Google Reader. Bummer. I suppose I could forward them to this group since TB treats them almost identical to emails. They come in, I read them, mark them as read, delete them, etc.

A couple other interesting gems... I like threaded conversations (far better than Gmail's), I like tags, I like saving search results as special folders, I like changing the colors of my apps. I like having email fetched from a non-primary Gmail account (more of a test run) -- all of which TB2 now supports.

Google has me concerned. The DoubleClick purchase and the partnership with ClearChannel both left a sour taste on my tongue after reading them. I disabled and deleted my Search ( now Web) history, uninstalled Google Desktop and have started thinking long and hard about my reliance on Google. Be on the look out for a forwarded email from me regarding Google. It gave me the creeps when I read it in TB. Is it better to eat a rotten apple than no apple at all?

I suppose the thing that always kills me is that I'm tied to one damn computer with desktop apps. Bah.

Also.. As a note, any members can post to this group simply by writing and sending an email to knapp-...@googlegroups.com. It's how I sent this message.

In other news, I'm on the tail end to another crappy cold. And a shoutout to our beloved friend jimithesaint who celebrate a birthday this past Thursday. :-)