Email Software Google Follow Up

Last post I wrote about the new version of Thunderbird.

Now that all my emails over the past 5 years have been indexed and downloaded I was able to play with it a little more.

The key feature that I'm loving is the search. Previous versions only allowed searching within a folder. In other words you had to be in the folder you were searching. Now search is global. Its able to search through all folders. Pretty handy when you have hundreds of thousands of emails and can't remember which folder a particular message may have been dumped to.

Also there are filters. From the search results you can narrow down to a folder, filter by if it was to you or from you. Also by attachment or particular email address.

Invaluable resource, plus its pretty fast. Just over a minute, assuming much fast with less messages.

Been uses Google Chrome solid for 2 weeks now. Had one complete crash. Seemed random and hasn't happened since. I don't like not having a search bar but for my development work and also db admin tools I haven't needed a search bar. It seems much much faster than Firefox. Especially on start up. Fires right up where Firefox takes a minute. Auto complete of favorites and previously visited sites is nice. Just type a few letters and it starts auto filling like Google search does. Firefox also has this. A problem I have been having however is sometimes it wants to hang on changing addresses. For example I'll have multiple tabs open and pick one to go to a new site. Lets say going from a db admin panel to gmail. I start typing gmail and it props I hit enter and it sits. I click the arrow to load a page and it sits. Have to click home and try to start over or close the tab altogether. Very annoying but doesn't happen that often. Because of these little things I'm not sold on it yet, however its still cool enough and fast enough I'm continuing to use it. Going to give it another week or two before committing. I'll keep you posted.

Also switched to Google DNS. Very disappointed. Easy to set up, simple access your router or computers network and change the dns servers to Google's servers. However, it was significantly slower than my ISP DNS. I've dumped it and have gone with OpenDNS. I'll do my next post on OpenDNS. Awesome fast tool for DNS. Plus it has filtering. So if you have kids and want to filter content this an amazing and easy to set up tool. Again more details in the next post.

Christensen out..

Email Software

When it comes to email I use Mozilla Thunderbird. Its free and easy to use. In my opinion the two most important factors.

Just last night I updated to Thunderbird v. 3. I plan on doing a full review but for the moment a quick recap.

Cool things in version 3:

Tabs. Now when you open an email it opens in a tab like Chrome and Firefox. Its taken me a while but I really dig tabbed anything anymore.

Search. Now you can search all folders and every email. Very handy, at least for me. Before you had to be in the folder you wanted to search. Now you can search all folders globally. I have hundreds of thousands (don't think I've hit the million mark yet, but not really counting) so a global search is really handy.

Sync: Now in imap folders and email are synced with the local computer so you can work offline. Not all that cool since I'm online all the time anyway, but with a local copy if something happens to the server all is not lost, but since I'm running said server its pretty safe.

I'll have more in days to come. Right now the sync processing is taking for ever on first install since I have so many emails. I keep every email I send or get for record keeping. I can go back to any email ever. In today's business world you can't be too careful so I keep everything.

I've also decided to give Google Chrome and Google DNS a try. Been using Chrome for a whole week and will write up how it went and if I will stick to it in the next post. Same with DNS.

Christensen out..