Carl Hutzler's Blog

I downloaded Thunderbird 3.0 Beta 3 about a month ago and have been VERY impressed with the fixed things and added new features. Specifically these huge wins:

• Integration with Mac OS X Spotlight search. I can now search for anything in my mail really quickly. This is huge for me especially when I am looking for an ecommerce receipt during my business billing/accounting efforts.
• Fixed the issue with the inability to drag and drop images from a a web page directly into an email. It used to work with 2.0 a while back but it somehow stopped working and would only drop in the URL of the image in plain text. But with 3.0 it works again. Small victories, I know.
• They also fixed the “format mail as plain text” option. What is this? Well I belong to a mailing list and they ONLY ALLOW plain text emails. Of course all of my other accounts I want normal html email. Thunderbird always had an option in the account config to denote certain email addresses or domains as plain text. But it never worked properly. It would always apply to every email and all accounts. Now I can set it for that one account to be plain text and all others are normal html. Saves me a lot of bounces back from freecycle.org

The one thing I don’t like a lot is that when I highlight a bunch of emails just before I mark them as read, Thunderbird tries to give me short summaries of the emails. Sort of like gmail conversations. This is not a bad thing, but it seems to slow down the client. I wish I knew how to just disable this function which I do not use. Maybe there is a hidden option in the about:config?

A technical issue at our email hosting provide this week forced us to move a bunch of mailboxes to a new server. The moves went just fine for 6 out of 8 people. But two people experienced duplicate calendar events on their blackberries. Evidently the blackberry had some data left over from the old server and sync’d up new event data to the new server which resulted in dupes. One user told me about a couple of issues and he deleted the dupes on the BB and it seemed to work just fine. So I thought nothing much of it.

Another user, Jessie, had a lot of dupes and when she went to clean it up on her BB, she ended up deleting the events on the new server. This left her with stale, non-sync’d events on her BB and an empty calendar on the exchange server. Had I known, I would have just had her wipe the handheld and re-activated, but the damage had been done.

I tried restoring her calendar from her Blackberry via USB but the blackberry has limited data, is unaware of “all day” and “recurring” type events, and is generally missing a lot of other fields/data…so it was a dead end.

Jessie’s calendar data was gone. Or was it?
Read more

I use Gmail to host my carlhutzler.com email. It is free and very versatile. They have great spam fighting as well. But I started to get concerned about false positives with Gmail the other day when my buddy Tken said an email I just sent to him went to his spam folder (he hosts his domain on gmail as well).

Then yesterday I found out one of my client’s had responded to me about 3 weeks ago and her email went to my spam folder. Not that this is a big cause for alarm, one false positive (that I have noticed) in two years is not bad. But maybe there are more?

As one preventative step, I decided to look at my gmail address book (contacts) to see how many were in the list. Turns out I only had 75 contacts! But my local email program on my desktop had over 2000. Hmmmm. I guess Gmail does not “collect” addresses as I send them from my desktop email program (via SMTP). Or maybe there is a setting to allow that? I am not aware of one, but boy should they have it.

Anyway, I use Thunderbird for my email client and I did a quick google search and found a plugin called “Zindus” that will allow you to sunc (bi-directional if you like) to gmail from thunderbird. While the interface/set-up is a little clunky looking, it does work. After a little playing, I was able to sync my 2000+ contacts to Google. And it removed dupes as well!

This should help with spam reliability from people I already email regularly and will make using the Google webmail interface more versatile as I don’t have to remember everyone’s address if I am away from my laptop.

Oh, and I also found that you can now sign into AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) from within the Gmail web interface now. Bonus :-)