2005-02-21 Software

Apple’s Mail application looks similar to Thunderbird and so I decided to give it a try. One problem I was never able to solve was that I could not accept the certificate of one of my mail servers. I *think* the certificate was signed by an expired certificate, and that in turn was self signed, or something like that. In case Mail app locked up whenever I tried to drag the certificate onto the desktop (the first step in the process to accepting the certificate). Oh well, let’s try Thunderbird on OSX.

The first thing I noticed was that sometimes dialog boxes were not well-behaved – either not wide enough for the entire text (a localization problem maybe – longer German texts but fixed width message boxes?). The second thing was that Thunderbird did not interact with Apple’s Addressbook. Damn. And even more frustrating: Thunderbird’s addressbook doesn’t import vCards! The time I invested in exporting my BBDB data into vCards that Apple’s Addressbook could read was wasted.

BBDB

The third thing I noticed was that Apple’s Mail had *not deleted* my mail from gnu.org after fetching them via POP3. I got over 650 mails from my gnu.org account. How aggravating.

Anyway, my Apple Dock now shows the Finder, Thunderbird, Firefox, MacIrssi, iChat, Skype, SSH Agent, iTunes, Terminal, Emacs, TextEdit, Notes, Inkscape, and Addressbook.

Something I noticed in Firefox just now was that tabbing through a form will skip checkboxes and buttons. Grrr! And backspace doesn’t go to the previous page.

Another I noticed in Thunderbird (for OSX) is that when you enable *all* headers, and the headers are longer than the entire window (as they invariably are), then there will be no vertical scrollbars to scroll the message. Grrr.

Then I went through about 500 mails in Thunderbird, classifying them as spam and ham, and then I clicked on the wrong menu so I had to do it all a second time. But now it’s down.

Claudia came back from Beirut and Istanbul yesterday, and fetchmail was acting up, so I migrated her stuff from fetchmail/Gnus to Thunderbird as well (on my SlackWare box).

Gnus

SlackWare

​#Software