Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Mail Programs: The Postman always rings twice, or three times....

I just can't help myself, trying out different programs. However, there are pitfalls sometimes, and I fell into one yesterday, from which I barely recovered today....

I've been using Thunderbird from Mozilla for several years, because it worked and the price was right, and I was familiar with it. But what about all these web applications now-a-days, I wondered. So I tried Gmail (because I blog on Google's 'Blogger') and while I was at it, and to be fair to the competition, also tried Windows Live Mail. Gmail has some nice features that I like, and Windows Live is a perfect fit in Windows 7 - and I love those Photo Emails with the nice layout of thumbs pointing to larger images stored on the web.  I give them both almost equal marks for spit, polish, convenience, and features.

Just don't try to cross-link three or four different incarnations of them together through your (old) Thunderbird program!!! Not unless you don't mind growing older while untangling the gawd-awful mess that will result when configuring for them gets at odds with whatever your original mail program and your I.S.P. think they should be seeing. 

Solution: (for us leap-before-you-look types!) - Dump Thunderbird, including its hidden bits in hidden folder AppData/local and its left-overs in its Program Files folder - then unlink the several webmail user accounts created to try that out, and get each of Windows Live Mail and Gmail functioning independently again, and peace will return to the valley.... If I hear you asking "How can I read my email files now, if I've thrown out the program which created those *.eml files? Good News, Kiddies - NotePad, WordPad, and Windows Live Mail can open those for you, if you select the proper extensions from the choices offered.

You don't need to spend an afternoon in those Forums reading dumb-assed babble, or surfing for help on Google or Bing. Trust me - would I lie to you?
 

No comments:

Post a Comment