Recently in Thunderbird Category

I'm a stickler for backups. I do them all the time. I make more than one copy.

The worst thing about my backups is Thunderbird mail. I POP the mail down to my local computer for various reasons, and if you use Thunderbird this way, you know that it uses the mbox format, which leads to some very large files.

And every time you get an e-mail, those large files change ever so slightly.

I'm using rsync as my backup utility, and backing up the Thunderbird mail always takes a very, very, very long time.

I don't know for sure if I'm invoking the "copy only parts of the file that changed" switch in rsync (I use rsync -av --delete), but whether I am or not, it takes an awfully long time to complete the backup.

It takes so long that I have one script to back up all my user files except Thunderbird mail and another script that does Thunderbird mail only.

All in all, I'd rather have my POP mail saved in a format that creates thousands of small files, most of which never change, rather than a few dozen huge ones that are always changing.

Former Novell exec (and current highly esteemed blogger) Matt Asay opines on Novell's announcing that it lost the city of L.A.'s e-mail business to Google Apps:

This isn't the Novell that I know. I used to work for Novell, and have never seen the company publicly criticize a customer, not even for defection, of which Novell has seen plenty over the last decade.

It's unclear who Novell is hoping to persuade with the announcement, or what benefit it hopes to derive from it. Is it trying to stem a tide of customers dropping GroupWise for Google Mail? If so, why has it not done the same for all the companies (and there have been plenty) leaving GroupWise for Microsoft Exchange or IBM Notes/Domino?

I've used GroupWise before in a previous job. This was more than a few years ago, when a Web-based mail client as a companion to a traditional client app was a bit more novel (no pun intended, but if you choose such intention, I won't be angry about it) than it is today.

I neither liked nor hated Novell's e-mail implementation. I did find the Web component a tad awkward (but remember, this was a bit less than 10 years ago).

And today I choose to use the "traditional" Thunderbird mail client in many instances where I could use a Web-based client, mostly because the system my company uses for Web-based mail is both slow, feature-poor ... and did I say slow? A good many of my co-workers pipe their mail through Google's Gmail, and I probably should, too. If I didn't have such a favorable impression of Thunderbird, I'd probably do just that (and I could do it anyway and keep using Thunderbird if I so chose; I'm just too lazy at present to try it).

But Gmail — and Google Apps — are very, very different from the traditional way of computing, with information stored on the local drive or on a LAN, apps on the local client/drive and possibly a Web interface as an afterthought.

It's a whole new world, and there are probably more than a few companies large and small can do most everything they need with Google Apps. There's nothing stopping said companies from using OpenOffice or even the full MS Office for as many or few desktops as they wish.

And Novell never acknowledges that L.A. city workers' opinion of its services and systems is not good. Downtime is a problem.

So now it's sink/swim time for Google in the enterprise, a place where until now it did not care to tread but also where, at present, it's turning everything we know about enterprise computing upside down (along with cloud leader Amazon ... and probably soon IBM and others).

L.A.'s the big-city Guinea pig for cloud computing; in the months ahead we'll see who thinks it cute and cuddly and who smells the proverbial rat.

After planning for weeks to take my main production laptop from OpenBSD 4.4 to 4.5, I sweated through the upgrade only to lose what was perfect X compatibility and pull the "kill switch," which in this case was transferring everything in my freshly rsync'd backup to my identical Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, a system I've been running for quite awhile on this and another laptop — and which has thus far proven itself to be stable enough for the pounding I give these machines in my daily work.

OpenBSD 4.4 basically "saved" me and one of these marginal Toshiba laptops (both were destined for the garbage) last November when I could barely get an install CD of any type to boot. The install floppy in OpenBSD enabled me to quickly set up a system that worked quite well and did almost everything I needed it to do. And stability was almost a given. I rarely had a problem that wasn't inherent to OpenBSD itself (such as the difficulty of installing Java, nothing past Flash Player 7, the extra steps required to properly configure things such as CUPS).

Since the system ran so well — just like Ubuntu 8.04, video on this Intel-based system ran perfectly with no xorg.conf — I kept it going for the entire six months of the OpenBSD 4.4 release's life.

As those who use OpenBSD know, upgrading the operating system is not as easy as it is in your average Linux distribution. It pretty much comes with the territory that a -release upgrade requires preparation, following instructions, and a bit of manual command-line work. Many times I've heard — both in OpenBSD and in Linux for that matter — that it's easier and cleaner to do a full reinstall rather than an in-place upgrade.

I will still try a full reinstall of OpenBSD 4.5. And I'd like to try running -current — the OpenBSD development branch that can be regularly updated and which is famously stable despite the "development" tag.

But right here, right now, I can't spend weeks diagnosing my X issues (briefly, there's some funky junk hanging from the cursor, and "artifacts" linger on the screen, which isn't redrawn fast enough/often enough to make X usable). The same thing turned me away from Debian Lenny on this and my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop in the months before the then-Testing distro went Stable. Because of my affection for Debian (still one of my very favorite operating systems), I spent weeks trying to diagnose the problem before realizing that dozens of other distros relieved me of the need to obsess (unsuccessfully) over it.

Right now the Gateway, used by our 5-year-old dual-boots Ubuntu 8.04 for her and CentOS 5.3 just because it runs so extremely well on that particular laptop.

And for months now I've had this other Toshiba laptop running Ubuntu 8.04 as a backup. I have Java installed, which I do need. Flash, too. The Opera Web browser.

Today I added Inkscape, Thunderbird, gFTP and Gparted.

On the OpenBSD laptop, I had about 1 GB of e-mail in Thunderbird. It makes rsyncing the box such hell that I'm thinking of writing a script that EXCLUDES the Thunderbird files just so the rest of the backup doesn't take so damn long ... but I digress.

I figured out how to bring my Thunderbird settings and mail over to the Ubuntu machine. I did the same with my Firefox bookmarks.

-- Begin tutorial:

Moving bookmarks from one Firefox 3 installation to another:

• Since Firefox now uses the SQlite database to store/organize its bookmarks, simply moving the bookmarks.html file from one Firefox 3 installation to another will DO ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. You need to do it another way, which I describe right here. First, grab the bookmarks.html file from your old FF installation and put it somewhere in your /home directory where you can easily find it.

• In the Firefox 3.0 installation where you want to IMPORT the bookmarks, go to the Bookmarks tab and click on/choose Organize Bookmarks.

• Click on the Import and Backup drop-down menu and click Import HTML.

• Then navigate to the bookmarks.html file from your old FF 3 installation (you have moved it over already, haven't you?) and click it to bring it into your new installation.

• Note: In Ubuntu at least, this process WON'T allow you to see hidden files or directories, so before you begin, copy your old bookmarks.html file to a place in your home directory where you don't need to go into your old installation's .mozilla directory, for instance.

• FYI: In both of my Firefox 3 installations, the bookmarks.html file is located here:

  /home/username/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxx.default/bookmarks.html

  In the above example, "username" is your actual username, and the eight x's are the unique alphanumeric prefix that Firefox gives to your "default" directory under /.mozilla/firefox/
  

-- End tutorial.

-- Resume rant.

OK, so I'm fully operational in Ubuntu at this point. My respect and admiration for the developers and users of OpenBSD remains, and I hope to get the other Toshiba fully operational under OpenBSD 4.5 as soon as possible.

But I'd be lying if I didn't say I was relieved to have, in Ubuntu, a machine and system that easily updates all of its software with a few clicks and provides me with what — at this point — is a trouble-free working environment.

Of course that could all change. I'll see over the next week how well Ubuntu 8.04 LTS performs on this hardware, with my chosen applications and for the tasks I have.

I could start the distro-hopping merry-go-round and go back to Debian, try out Slackware, ZenWalk, etc., but right now if Linux in this form does what I need it to do (not crash, run acceptably fast, wash, rinse, repeat), I'll be sticking with Ubuntu as long as it fills the bill.

The fact that Mozilla's Thunderbird e-mail client has no built-in way to export the whole of a user's mail from one installation to another is as close to a fatal flaw as can be for a class of application — the stand-alone mail client — as can be.

Now that I've had a week or so since I started trying to move mail from one box to another, I've learned that there are a couple of plugins out there for Thunderbird that supposedly help you do this.

Even so, the consensus appears to be that you need to just pull the whole nested-directory mess over from one installation to the next. The problem for me is that I don't have access to the proper directory on my Windows box, so I'll have to do it with a Linux live CD).

Would it kill the developers to embed export functionality into Thunderbird? Would that be so terrible, allowing users to have a little control and freedom when it comes to how they access their own e-mail?

You can easily import messages into Thunderbird (Tools -- Import in the menu). For the sake of freedom and sanity, it should be just as easy to export out of the app.

Is there a reason Thunderbird doesn't include export? I'd sure like to know.

I've been accessing my main e-mail account via IMAP for years now. With IMAP, the mail stays on the server, and the mail client brings down the headers and then any messages necessary. That way I can go anywhere, use any computer and have access to that mail with another mail program, or use the same mail server's Web interface to check up on my latest messages.

My main mail client (or I could just say "program," like I did in the last paragraph to make it simpler) is Thunderbird. I can't say I'm deliriously happy with Thunderbird. One reason I use it is that it's available for Windows and Unix/Linux, so I can use it in any of the hundreds of GNU/Linux distributions, in any BSD system, on my Windows box at work, and even on Mac OS if I felt like it (I don't).

Anyhow, I'm not feeling so good lately about leaving my mail on the server. I generally filter quite a bit of it (Thunderbird is great with filters, by the way) down to the local drive anyway, and now I want all of my mail off of a server I don't control and onto a system (or systems) I do control.

Hence POP, or Post Office Protocol, which reigned supreme in the pre-broadband days when people didn't stay connected to their mail server all the time. Back in the day, a user would dial up with a telephone modem, grab their mail with POP, have any mail they composed offline sent, and then read new mail at their leisure, connecting again later to send additional messages.

I just POP-ped down (is it really POP-ped?) a few thousand messages, and for now I'll just say that moving a complicated heap of mail in folders down via POP is messy and nearly undoable. And the mail server in question, at any rate, isn't happy about mass downloads of mail all at once to the local drive.

I lost more than a few messages, I think (it's hard to tell), but I'm glad to have all of that mail off the server.

Meanwhile, I've been using Thunderbird heavily in OpenBSD 4.4, and whether due to the OS or the app, the mail client is running way better here than in Windows. Everything is happening very quickly with no glitches.

Truth time: All of this gives me a very warm feeling about the Web-based e-mail services I also use every day: Yahoo Mail and Google's Gmail. Both of these have given me way less trouble than IMAP, POP and traditional mail clients ever have. (And for the moment I'll forgive Yahoo for the problems I'm having with their "new" mail interface and Google's Chrome browser ... can't compose an e-mail that way; I hope they're working on it.)