Looks like I've been neglecting the blog lately...

I have an excuse, too. For the past several days, I've been trying out a different email system that I'm not familiar with, and having some troubles getting it and the previous one working together, and delivering all the mail that comes to each one of them. 

All this stuff about POP3 and IMAP and HTML and webmail versus the kind that is done by a program on your own computer has left me confused. I'm easy to confuse these days, it seems.  But I think I've finally got everything co-operating with each other, and catching whatever is supposed to be caught.


I do have one complaint about Windows Live Mail however. It doesn't seem to be very good at handling Spam or junk mail, and it seems to need better filters for that. We ought to be able to specify, for example, that anything coming in which is from anyone not in our personal address book or contacts list as WLM likes to call it would get directly sent to the trash. Instead, there seems to be some elaborate routine that has to be performed, moving files from folder to folder, and then deleting something out of the Deleted folder - like the guys who planned all that were hoping that somewhere along that line, you'd get tired of all that horseshit, and just say the hell with it, and leave all that crap in the files somewhere, to clog up the system, and consume storage space, and make it look like there's a hell of a lot of serious activity on there, when it's really all just a pile of junk mail trying to sell you Viagra or one of its competitors from some fly-by-night operation you'd have to be nuts to deal with anyway. 


I'd like to suggest that the folks at Microsoft have another long hard look at Mozilla's Thunderbird, and observe how it uses filters for junk mail, and how it deletes unwanted stuff with one decisive act - not a whole series of bullshit repetitions, leaving you wondering if the shit is really gone now or not. If they could clean up Vasta Vista and turn it into Windows 7, with all its wonderful features, then why can't they have a go at their overly complicated mail programs and get something we can use without wasting half a day trying to figure out where to start looking for what we wanted, and why we can't dump the crap without a half-hour procedure? And here I was thinking that Microsoft had finally seen the light, and realized who is paying for all this stuff. If time is money, then we're paying too much.