Vincent Cheung

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Monday, June 07, 2004

Mozilla has the Google Toolbar (well, close enough) and Thunderbird

I just found out that while Google's Toolbar doesn't work with Mozilla Firefox, there's an extension that does it! Goolgebar

That solves my problem that I can't get text highlighting and easy searching (as I was able to do with the Google toolbar in IE).

I've all but converted to Firefox and Thunderbird (the Mozilla e-mail client) now. Thunderbird can't check Hotmail accounts, but my Mailblocks account checks my Hotmail accounts for me and use a challenge-response system to eliminate all my spam! (I love my Mailblocks account). Thunderbird handles IMAP servers better than Outlook Express. Plus, it has junk mail filtering (not that I really need it, but it's nice to train), and a bunch of little things that Outlook Express doesn't have (OE hasn't been updated for a while now....).

I do have a few quirks with Thunderbird. One, you can't have it check all your e-mail accounts by pressing one button. It'll check all your accounts when you start it and every x minutes, but there's no button you can click to have it check it all. I got an extension that apparently does it, but I'm not sure if it actually does or not. Another thing is that I liked it when OE showed you which servers it was downloading from as it checked your mail (rather than just flashing it on the status bar). The newsreader is better than in OE, but still doesn't handle binary files split across multiple messages. I've been using NewsBin Pro for downloading off newsgroups, which I don't really do, except occasionally.... My last beef is that you can't password protect your inbox. That is, anyone can just open up Thunderbird and read all your e-mail. OE has a profile thing where you can password protect the entrance into your e-mail. Thunderbird has a profile thing, but doesn't let you password protect it and exiting a profile is kinda funky - sometimes when I go "file, close" it kicks me out and next time I load the program, it asks me which profile I want to load, and other times it doesn't.... It also seems to take up a lot of memory.... It also splits up your POP3 e-mail into different folders. You can't consolidate all POP3 e-mail into one giant inbox like with OE, but it's also kinda good that way - you know what e-mail came from where, but for me, I don't really use any of my POP3 accounts, and dumping them all in one place is fine for me..... oh well.

That's all for now. So, I've fully converted to Firefox and Thunderbird. I only use IE to access my INGDirect account and some pages on Supernova that don't seem to work with Firefox and I haven't opened OE for a while (either at home or at school).

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