BlogFish

I'm just back from today's Web 2.0 Expo sessions and I'm not sure I will attend tomorrow. Many have written about this before, but the creative, social atmosphere is missing due to the conference labyrinth halls. Boy, I'm happy I haven't spend > 1.000 Euros on this. No real food, a lot of product presentations, not enough room for socializing and to many suits for my taste.

Still, I had some nice conversations and met some interesting people.

I did again a session on scaling with Amazon EC2 and S3, the slides can be found here.

This time a also talked a bit about how we use S3 and EC2 to drive our Webmail Portal product, PeritorMail at Peritor.

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Also nice the AWS announcement of S3 being available in EU data centers. Now I'm only waiting for EC2 in the EU...

I spent 4 hours fighting with my mail programs. When I switched to the mac long ago (OS X 10.1) I tried several mail programs and after a long journey I got stuck with Microsoft Entourage. I know, I know.

Whenever new mail programs appeared I gave them a chance but until today none of Apple Mail, Eudora, Thunderbird & co. could satisfy me. With Tiger and Apple Mail 2.0 again I tried to escape Microsoft. I created several of my accounts in Apple Mail but got annoyed fast. Apple Mail does not support line-wrapping after 72/80 characters, the thread support is worse than not having one like Entourage, I cannot see any detailed information about the ongoing connections, there is no support for different dictionaries (l want to write some mails in German and some in English) and no 3 column view for my 17” PowerBook. The list is nearly endless, but the first point alone is a killer for me. The tao of the mac has a nice bash of Mail 0.2.

After several days trying to live with this mess, I gave Thunderbird 1.0.2 a try. Again I got frustrated:

• Standard composing style is HTML, you have to change it for every account.
• In order to get Thunderbird to use a different smtp server for each account I have to find and use multiple “advanced” menus, hidden at awkward places. Again over 5 clicks for every Account.
• This procedure is very exhausting as all the advanced menus are scrolling down from above after the original menu has scrolled up. This takes 1 second per scroll on the Mac.
• Spelling is only checked when I want to send the mail, not as I type. This is also very annoying as there are many words, that a dictionary spellcheck does not know and I know it beforehand. I do not want to correct smtp, TLS, SSL, SSH, and so on. I also do not want to spend years inserting these words. I want to know that a word is incorrect after I wrote it and I want to be able to ignore it when I know that it is okay.
• Thunderbird seems to have problems with smtp and TLS/SSL. With smtp configured to use TLS/SSL I cannot send mail through some account there are flawlessly working with Entourage or Apple Mail.
• Thunderbird has its own certificate management. Sounds good at first but is bad if you use Apple’s system-wide one and already imported several certificates. Now you have to import them again.
• The address book does not support nested books or groups. If I want to have several groups, I have to create new books. If someone should be in several groups, he has to be in several books and his data will be saved twice!
• I get no detailed information of what is going on when I send or receive mails. Have a look at Entourages status menu.
• The “Get Mail” Button only checks for the active account, I cannot let it download new mail from every account if they are configured to use their own inbox folder. I have to use the menu under the button to check for all mail. This is very annoying!
• Each mail account can be configured to “download email automatically”. I can can nowhere configure how often this will happen.

I’d love to get away from MS Entourage but do not know yet if I can live with Thunderbird. I will try it several days and judge then.