A.P. Lawrence

Mozilla to the Rescue

Wed Jun 16 21:55:20 GMT 2004 Mozilla to the Rescue

Once again, Microsoft demonstrates their superior programming abilities. In spite of (or maybe because of) the immense resources that they have to draw upon, we all know that Outlook and Outlook Express are somewhat fragile. Today I had a call where Outook couldn't open its Inbox, helpfully explaining that the problem might be low disk space or memory. Neither case was true, so I tried compacting folders. That let it open the Inbox, and for a second or so you could see messages, but then it would crash and die completely. Not very useful.

I downloaded Mozilla Thunderbird, and told it to import from Outlook. It happily did so, bringing in 1,125 messages that Outlook itself couldn't read. It did take a few minutes to get that folder indexed for the first time, so we had to watch the hourglass spin for a while, but it finished up and all was once again available.

I suppose I could have wiped out Outlook's Inbox and re-imported the Mozilla back to Microsoft, but why would I? The stupid thing will just break again, so why look for trouble? Smarter to run something better.

Not that you SHOULD have 1,125 messages in your Inbox. Make sub folders and copy them out - having too many messages only confuses the Outlooks even more. Remember also that you need to empty your Deleted Items folder - if you don't, you are certain to break Outlook sooner rather than later.

Psst - Wanna work for yourself?

Comments
CommentsBlog915 :

...and hence the nickname Outlook Distress. Mozilla unfortunately doesn't have the calendar or scheduling features Outlook does.

dhh

Personally I use Evolution, from Ximian. I don't think they have a version for Windows, though. It has scedualling and calender features similar to outlook.

Personally I like the filtering ability for my home desktop, any spam and I make a rule for it and it instantly dumps any future spam similar to the e-mail I zapped.

Plus their are some Exchange-type servers aviable commercially for Linux/Unix enviroments that Evolution can talk with. And you can hook up Evolution to a MS Exchange server in some way. Maybe with "Crossover" plugins and a extra MS add-on with Exchange (extra $).

Not sure of the details and I don't know how the scedualing stuff stacks up against Outlook, I never have used those features in either app.

-Drag

"Mozilla unfortunately doesn't have the calendar or scheduling features Outlook does."

Any competent UNIX or Linux jock could provide those features. I use a scheduling function I wrote a number of years ago that amounts to nothing more than a shell script reading users' "calendars" and generating E-mail as required. A simple text file is the "calendar," with tab-delimited fields indicating date, time, who, what, etc. At 5 AM each day, a cron job runs this mess and E-mails the day's schedule to the appropriate individuals.

I think it's important to understand that Mozilla is a web browser/E-mail client, not an all-in-one, does everything but brew coffee application. Outlook is typical Microsoft programming, in which totally unrelated features (E-mail and scheduling) are coalesced into a bloated and unstable package (let Outlook's in-box get too big and you'll see what I mean about unstable).

--BigDumbDinosaur

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