Peter's Blog

Whee google have enabled imap in my gmail account. Maybe I will do something about the 2016 messages in my inbox. Or maybe not.

I've got 5260 messages in all, taking up 347Mb of my 4536M of space.

I only delete spam.

I am back with Google Desktop Search. I was using MSN desktop search but I got tired of it not shutting down with the computer. I have moaned about GDS in the past, particularly that I don't like the idea of results appearing in a web browser because the only thing you can do is open them, you don't have Windows Explorer's right-click context menu. After months of using MSN search I have decided that this is not a big deal: on the whole I can remember where things are and I use salamander to access them, I only use search when I have lost something.

GDS integrates better with thunderbird than MSN search did: I installed an MSN thunderbird plugin but it never worked. GDS supports it out-of-the-box, although as I use IMAP it will only index the messages I actually open, not the 2400 messages in my archives (unless I view them all one at a time).

I have come to appreciate the various plugins available for the GDS sidebar, especially the email preview thing: in fact I find myself reading email on that rather than switching to thunderbird. There are many plugins available but their installation programs often seem excessively large (megabytes) for something that is hosted by another application and appears in a window two inches square.

I have stopped using Opera for now: it's mail reader was not showing me the contents of some messages so I abandoned it. Some emails can crash it and it is still not as compatible with web sites as firefox. It has got me hooked on gestures and I find myself gesturing in FireFox to no avail (except at microsoft.com). I have installed a gesture extension and am hoping the next point release of firefox doesn't break it.

I'm trying the Opera 9 preview as an alternative (or complement) to Firefox. Opera has been attractive to me in the past but always gave odd rendering problems or crashes that put me off. This version has been ok thus far and has features built in that are quite seductive. Ok firefox has extensions but these all seem to break every time they upgrade it and I have got fed up with reinstalling them (too high maintenance).

Opera goodies, some maybe all available as Firefox extensions but are bundled with opera:

• Fast Forward: this button seems to find the 'next' link on your page and clicks it for you. You can go through google results very quickly.
• gestures: right click and move the cursor around to control the browser: e.g. right click and move right does the fast forward action so takes you to the next page with no fuss and minimal physical effort.
• email client: this supports IMAP and works with Microsoft Exchange. It chucks all email in one folder and gives lots of options for searching through it. For example, you click on a contact name and see all the mail from that contact. Looks ok so far and is appealing as the memory footprint of Opera should be less than Firefox + Thunderbird. Only downside so far: cannot compose html email. Not a showstopper as I rarely bother to format email (like I rarely bother to format blog postings) and it does display html email (as a web browser should be able to).
• It supports widgets if you have a need for a huge clock that cannot be resized. There are only 9 of them so far (clock, calculator, calendar etc).

Possibly more cool: Opera Mini. This is a version of Opera written in Java so it works on my Sony-Ericsson K750i phone. This is a proper web browser, it supports http/html, it is not a crippled WAP thing so you can look at real web sites. It displays them in a tiny font that gets a lot of info on the screen. It communicates with a server at Opera which compresses the pages you are viewing and minimises the download: the front page of this site was a 8k! I installed it thusly:

• Download the .jar and .jad files for the k750i.
• Connect phone to USB
• Copy files to \MSSEMC\Media files\other
• Unplug phone (stopping USB devices on Windows 2000, not necessary on XP).
• On phone, go to 'My Items', Other.
• Select the .jar file, right click and Install. It will ask you if you want it installed as an Application or Game: you decide.
• For uk vodafone, go to Settings/Connectivity/Internet Settings/Internet Profiles and create a new profile. Give it any name and set the 'Connect Using' field to 'Contract Internet'.
• Go to Settings/Connectivity/Internet Settings/Settings for Java(tm) and select here the new profile you created above.
• Go to My Items/Applications (or Games) and select Opera Mini. It will do a connectivity test. If it fails the internet profile for java above might be wrong.
• Enjoy

Using another PC at work and getting tired of Microsoft Exchange Web Access, a pretty poor web email application. What to do?

Put Portable Thunderbird on a Freecom USB hard disk and carry that around the building. I would use a flash drive but I would have to use my own and I don't want it performing excessive writes and using up the flashes erase cycles. I am using IMAP and keeping all the messages on the server but I don't want to take any chances. Portable Firefox does try to limit writes to flash.

The USB hard drive does appear to make the other PC I am using take about two minutes longer to boot which is more time to make coffee.

I copied the profile directory from my static thunderbird install to the portable one and it all seems to work fine.

I seem to get a lot of people visiting this site looking at how to use thunderbird with Exchange. I don't think I ever described it in detail as I found it quite easy. I just enabled an IMAP service on the exchange server and I connect to that from Thunderbird using the standard procedure (username/password). IMAP has the advantage of keeping all the messages on the server so it is someone elses problem to back them up. Also searching through messages seems to work much faster as the server is good at that kind of thing and Microsofts local message archive format, the .pst file, is pretty poor. It is probably just as easy to set up POP3. Email is sent using authenticated smtp so I am prompted for username/password to send messages.

With this setup I don't get shared calendars or any other executive gimmicks but I don't use them anyway.

Sorry if this suggestion seems inane but as far as I know this is the only way this can be done.

I've discovered Thunderbird saved searches. They allow me to create items in the tree thing on the left that act like folders full of messages that meet certain search characteristics. For example, I can have an item called 'fred' containing all messages from 'fred'. Previously to do this I would create a folder and get my filtering rules to try to shuffle incoming messages into the right folder. In outlook this was always flaky, in thunderbird I've never bothered. Saved searches are much easier to set up and have the advantage that if you change the search terms then the changes are applied immediately, you don't have to run all your messages through filtering rules again. Also messages can meet more than one search pattern: I could have a search for everyone in project X and I could also have searches for specific people in project X: the same messages could appear in both.

It's working nicely with Microsoft Exchange via IMAP: the searches occur instantly, no real overhead. This may be because the IMAP is offloading the search to the server. If the search was done locally I doubt that it would be so transparent.

Hum, as a concept these stored searches could be considered an alternative to tagging. Instead of manually having to mark an article as being about, say, ubuntu, the stored search would automatically search for the word ubuntu in the article and list the matches. It is more fiddly to create a search than a tag but they would require less maintenance. Tagging does give the possibility of structuring articles. Something else to think about.

Servant Salamander: coming to rely on this. Pretty much destined to register it. Today I discovered that I can get it to calculate space used in subdirectorys and then send a report of directory names and sizes, sorted by size, to the clipboard. Try doing that with Windows Explorer. I've stopped using filezilla, Salamander is a useful sftp client. Things I do wish it could do:

• copy directly from one sftp site to another. Similarly, since you can browse straight into a zip or tgz file, it would be nice to be able to copy a file from within an archive on one window to other window showing an sftp site. The user interface spoils you, you start thinking these things are possible, you try them and are thwarted.
• create tar.gz files. I have actually learned the incantation for this, I am becoming such a command line junkie:

  tar cvfz blah *
  

  It can do zips and rars and stuff.
• It sometimes goes a bit crazy with the confirmation dialogs, sometimes giving two or three in a row. I don't have faith enough to disable them, combining them into one dialog would be nice (e.g. yes I want to copy, I want to copy it there, I want to overwrite everything).

Thunderbird: since I fixed the exchange server I have been using this instead of outlook and have not looked back. I use an IMAP connection to the Exchange server and it is working just fine. I used to have problems with it when my network connection was flakier (it kept asking me for my password) but since I installed XP on my pc the network has been ok (one of those software decay things on my old Win2k install). I think outlook was tainted by spambayes which was pretty lethargic in moving spam around (to get around outlook's flaky message filtering it does lots of sleeps to keep out of the way). So you go to look at a message and find that spambayes is still in the process of moving it to the junk folder. Thunderbirds integrated bayesian spam filter is working for me. Another thing I like about thunderbird, the flag thing that pops up and goes away again when new mail arrives. The outlook taskbar thing always used to get stuck on, even after deleting new messages, to the extent that I disabled it.

I wanted to get the POP and IMAP services on our Exchange 2003 server running so:

• I could use Thunderbird (or at least had the choice)
• Folks could potentially look at their email from their mobile phones.

Clicking on the 'POP3' service in the Exchange manager gave the useless error 'The server is not operational'. Googling for this implied a DNS problem so I looked in the event log and found a number of instances of error event 5789. The details of this were:

Attempt to update DNS Host Name of the computer object in Active Directory failed.
The updated value was 'server.work.co.uk'. The following error occurred:

The parameter is incorrect.

Searching for event 5789 gave this MS knowledge base article. Aparently this error is due to the DNS domain name being different to the Active Directory Domain Name. In the case here, the DNS domain name of the exchange box should have been domain_name.work.co.uk, not work.co.uk. I fixed this in Control Panel/System/Network Identification and did the mandatory reboot.

When it came up, life was sweet, existing POP3 and IMAP services were reborn and Thunderbird is working nicely.

Moral: Never ever assume that working with Microsoft Exchange is easy.

Yesterday:

FireFox

decided to show me profile manager and refuses to let me open my old profile. Have to start new profile from scratch, installing extensions etc

ThunderBird

not connecting to IMAP server: waits forever and doesn't time out

The gmail way of working is a good model. Mail is received in the inbox, you read it and when you have digested it you press an 'Archive' button to move it from the inbox to the archive directory. I like this, it keeps the inbox clean of everything except email that needs dealing with. The old messages are out of the way, in a place where they can be ignored until 2 years later when you need to prove someone wrong.

I have started working like this on my dovecat IMAP/squirrelmail setup: I deal with stuff in the inbox and move it to one of the following:

• a project related folder
• an archive folder for general stuff.
• a 'spam.categorically' folder

This has another advantage because the archive folder will be full of 'ham' messages (not spam) and makes a good input to the spamassassin bayes filter. Messages in the inbox can go from 'unread' to 'deleted' very quickly, in which case the bayes filter does not get a chance to look at them as it learns on a cron job every night (hoping it will learn the new keyword 'rolex' real soon).

I still need to realise my dream of publishing the contents of the project related folders on a web server where they can be searched, linked to and ideally threaded. This needs some kind of mega mail tool. The closest I can find is mail list server stuff which I am not sure can deal with CC's etc. Mailman may be hackable, being python, but where I've seen it used the presentation is pretty poor, one of the things that puts me off subscribing to mailing lists.

Today I realised that I could use mozex and vim to edit email. I tried this with gmail and it went into a weird endless loop until I killed firefox. So I had a more serious try at using squirrelmail on my local imap server. Using gmail as a client had been bothering me as it's more of a black hole than outlook: how could I ever get my email archives back?

Running through email client alternatives:

Outlook

Big slow lumbering, much loved by ignorant phb's. Message filtering rules randomly disable themselves and cannot be relied upon. Taskbar indicator says messages are waiting even if filters mark them as read.

Thunderbird

Feels like a poor clone of outlook express. Whenever it can't connect to the imap server it decides it is because the password is wrong and I have to enter it again. Getting on my nerves.

Eudora

it only seems to last for about 5 minutes whenever I install it. I think 'so what' and delete it.

mutt

user interface design from the 1970's.

gmail

insists on putting signatures at bottom of replies, annoying for a top-poster like me. No way to get at archives apart from forwarding them all to self. Taskbar notifier either flaky or very sensitive detector of flaky networks. Notifier prompts me for user name and password whenever the pc boots. Both are already filled in I only have to press OK so it's not a security feature just an annoyance.

Squirrelmail

web-based, a little simplistic but not as simplistic as horder or neomail.

I have yet to find a truly lovable email client.

Spamassassin at work is detecting spam nicely, no false positives so far although some false negatives are getting through. I don't have a big enough spam or ham corpus to get the bayesian spam filter running but when I do this could make a difference.

I have created three IMAP folders for spam:

I then have a cron job running each night to run sa-learn --spam on the 'categorically' folder and sa-learn --ham on my inbox. It runs on the 'cur' subfolder but not the 'new' subfolder so it should not pick up spam that arrives when I am not around to approve it.

The Definitely spams are not added to the bayesian filter. I think this is best, it avoids reinforcing prejudices which is not a good thing.

The spam I receive has already been through the companys surfcontrol spam filter. Draw your own conclusions.

Something I must do sometime is extract 250M of old emails from my outlook archive and put them on the IMAP server. I could do this by hooking Outlook up to the IMAP server and just moving the messages but I have a gut feeling that this will take hours and involve a lot of pain.

At home I must figure out a way to get my old email out of the clutches of Intellimail so that I can uninstall it.

I've set up procmail and spamassassin everywhere. For an easy life I have it set up thusly:

• fetchmail scans POP servers
• exim processes received mail
• exim .forward file passes messages to procmail, e.g. (.forward)

# Exim filter
pipe "/usr/bin/procmail"

• procmail filters messages through spamassassin, e.g. (.procmailrc)

:0fw: spamassassin.lock
* < 100000
| spamassassin

# Mails with a score of 15 or higher are almost certainly spam (with 0.05%
# false positives according to rules/STATISTICS.txt). Let's put them in a
# different mbox. (This one is optional.)
:0:
* ^X-Spam-Level: \*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*
.Spam.Definitely/

# All mail tagged as spam (eg. with a score higher than the set threshold)
# is moved to "probably-spam".
:0:
* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes
.Spam.Possibly/

• procmail delivers messages to appropriate maildirs
• dovecot provides IMAP

There are ways to get exim to live with spamassassin directly, without procmail e.g.

• hook it directly into the virus scanning hooks of exim.
• put in a pipe so messages go through exim, out to spamassassin, back into exim via a second process and out through a different rule.

I put procmail into the equation for a few reasons:

• I find many procmail recipies on the internet, not many exim filter recipies.
• The exim online documentation is comprehensive but turgid and you have to totally understand how an MTA works to grasp any of it. The procmail documentation I have found is far more accessable.
• The .forward->procmail->spamassasin is simple and clean.

I haven't bothered setting up a server daemon for spamassassin which would speed up the email handling. Checking each email takes about 15 seconds but this is ok, I can wait that long.

Observations:

• DNS Block Lists (NOT RBL's) seem to work as DNS servers. Nice for getting through firewalls.
• Spamassassin takes advantage of Vipuls Razor and Pyzor which are essentially databases of known spam messages, but unfortunately these don't work through firewalls
• Procmail is nice: I've set it up to do all my delivery filtering.
• For procmail delivery rules, it is important to remember to put a trailing / if the target is a maildir directory. This has caught me a couple of times.
• procmail can handle spaces in maildir directory names if you use quotes, e.g.

:0
* ^From:.*Somebody
".Messages from somebody/"

• Nice being able to test spamassassin from the command line:

spamassassin -D < mailfile 

• It's taken me a few hours to learn that there are four s's in assassin. It seems to take an eternity to type.

Two Gentoo servers, one at work, one at home. The one at home seems fine, perfectly stable. The one at work has a problem where once every few days a few deamons will drop dead: syslog-ng, cupsd, apache, atd, cron etc. It is not always the same pattern of daemons and I'm having trouble working out the problem.

More often than not the first sign is that syslog-ng stops logging to /var/logs/messages. It may be tied up with cron running logrotate and the htdig indexer. Logrotate is set up with the standard config script for syslog-ng and I've checked the Gentoo CVS to make sure that it is up to date and I've run it from the command line with no ill effects.

My suspicion is that it is tied up with htdig indexer for a few reasons:

• I'm not running it at home and home pc is ok.

• When it runs it can tie the pc up heavily for a few seconds, long enough for IMAP clients to complain about loss of connection.

• CRON keeps sending me error messages like this:

   /usr/bin/rundig: line 53: 11495 Aborted                 $BINDIR/htnotify $opts 

Because it happens so infrequently I am waiting for the next occurence to do another post mortem.

I'd say Gentoo was hard work.

I think I did an emerge -u world last night but the at daemon hasn't sent me any mail. It seems to have happened because emerge --pretend -u world gives a different list compared to before.

The list of updated files includes vixie-cron and syslog-ng so it is worth doing.

I've been looking around the options for dynamic web content recently for various projects. One of them is to be hosted under IIS, the other I can do with as I please. The IIS based one required a CMS so that many people can add content. The original request was for something that used ASP, VBScript and Access databases and was not .NET. I searched around and found nothing suitable. Widening the search I came across Drupal which seemed to fit the bill except that it was PHP and MySQL.

At about the same time I was considering this I came across the PHP EasyWindows Installer which installs PHP as a CGI engine which is cool enough, I don't think I have to worry about high volume traffic.

So I installed it and MySQL on Windows XP and it runs a treat. The pages are server up quite swiftly and the package looks quite powerful. It looks nicely designed: a clear segragation between content (all stored in the database) layout (a single, nicely laid out template file that builds all the pages on the site, easily edited in HTML-Kit) and formatting (.CSS).

I'm still exploring it but it is looking suitable for my needs and the person I am doing it for has agreed to install PHP and MySQL on his windows box. I'm not reluctant to learn PHP although I find that after python all the $s in the code look like noise: not as bad as perl (from which it is distantly related) but nearly so. The drupal source that I have looked through is quite clean. There is not a great deal of documentation but that is par for the course. I might not even need to write any PHP, I've found modules to do most of the things I want.

One nice thing about Drupal that Python Desktop Server is lacking: a button to preview messages before submitting them.

For my other project I am looking into a way to present email archives on a web site. I've looked through various options, none of which appealed:

HyperLink

Crude presentation, no Gentoo ebuild.

MHonarch

Gentoo package failed to emerge

Macho

Nice presentation but an embarrasing name to search for on the net and also written in lisp (((ugh))). I don't really want to install yet another language and I certainly don't want to learn lisp.

Mailman

GNU list manager thing which includes a modern version of PiperMail which was what I wanted (python email->web code). I installed it but was boggled by the complexity so I uninstalled it quick. Life is too short. There are various other list managers I could hack on but it's a matter of finding the small part for presenting the archives amongst the rest of it. Plus I need to be sure they can handle multiple addresses, CC's, attachments, html mail etc.

Mod_Python

So I gave mod_python a whirl. It installed easily enough but I soon ran into a problem whereby if I generated too much HTML (two or three pages) then I'd get a segmentation error and no response from Apache. It's probably another Gentoo version mismatch problem but I didn't want to get involved so I ditched mod_python.

I finally decided upon python CGI. This was easy to set up and gives me total control. No learning curve beyond the cgi module and I can use the IMAP library to access my email.

I've been looking around the options for dynamic web content recently for various projects. One of them is to be hosted under IIS, the other I can do with as I please. The IIS based one required a CMS so that many people can add content. The original request was for something that used ASP, VBScript and Access databases and was not .NET. I searched around and found nothing suitable. Widening the search I came across Drupal which seemed to fit the bill except that it was PHP and MySQL.

At about the same time I was considering this I came across the PHP EasyWindows Installer which installs PHP as a CGI engine which is cool enough, I don't think I have to worry about high volume traffic.

So I installed it and MySQL on Windows XP and it runs a treat. The pages are server up quite swiftly and the package looks quite powerful. It looks nicely designed: a clear segragation between content (all stored in the database) layout (a single, nicely laid out template file that builds all the pages on the site, easily edited in HTML-Kit) and formatting (.CSS).

I'm still exploring it but it is looking suitable for my needs and the person I am doing it for has agreed to install PHP and MySQL on his windows box. I'm not reluctant to learn PHP although I find that after python all the $s in the code look like noise: not as bad as perl (from which it is distantly related) but nearly so. The drupal source that I have looked through is quite clean. There is not a great deal of documentation but that is par for the course. I might not even need to write any PHP, I've found modules to do most of the things I want.

One nice thing about Drupal that Python Desktop Server is lacking: a button to preview messages before submitting them.

For my other project I am looking into a way to present email archives on a web site. I've looked through various options, none of which appealed:

HyperLink

Crude presentation, no Gentoo ebuild.

MHonarch

Gentoo package failed to emerge

Macho

Nice presentation but an embarrasing name to search for on the net and also written in lisp (((ugh))). I don't really want to install yet another language and I certainly don't want to learn lisp.

Mailman

GNU list manager thing which includes a modern version of PiperMail which was what I wanted (python email->web code). I installed it but was boggled by the complexity so I uninstalled it quick. Life is too short. There are various other list managers I could hack on but it's a matter of finding the small part for presenting the archives amongst the rest of it. Plus I need to be sure they can handle multiple addresses, CC's, attachments, html mail etc.

Mod_Python

So I gave mod_python a whirl. It installed easily enough but I soon ran into a problem whereby if I generated too much HTML (two or three pages) then I'd get a segmentation error and no response from Apache. It's probably another Gentoo version mismatch problem but I didn't want to get involved so I ditched mod_python.

I finally decided upon python CGI. This was easy to set up and gives me total control. No learning curve beyond the cgi module and I can use the IMAP library to access my email.

I feel the need for a status report on various stuff I've mentioned in this blog.

Palm Tungsten T2

I haven't used this so much recently, I only use it as a diary. This is partly because it is summer and I don't wear a coat with pockets to carry it around. It's too big for trouser pockets. I do my blogging with Python Desktop Server, I don't use DayNotez any more.

Dell Inspiron 500m

I love my notebook, I'm using it now, I'd say it was my primary PC. I sit on the sofa in front of the TV and go through RSS feeds. My main gripe with it is that sometimes when it comes out of hibernate it does not see the wireless network and I have to hibernate it and unhibernate it again to kick it into life. Oh, also the SVideo output is only black and white. The laptop is just nice, no noisy fans and it doesn't make my lap overheat. About 2 hours of battery life.

Desktop PC

Hasn't crashed recently but that may be because I don't use it very often. The only time I used it this week was as a print server. The drivers with the PC TV card might have fixed the PCI latency issues. There are a number of PCs at work, including the firewall PC, that use VIA chipsets and they randomly hang as well. I have no love for VIA.

Python Desktop Server

Use it most days. I use it at work for my engineering logs which are behind a firewall. I haven't got around to adding tools or anything, I mainly use it for RSS aggregation. Having the aggregation in the web browser makes it so convenient for following links: in firefox I middle-click and read in a new tab. As a blogging tool my main gripe is the lack of a preview facility: checking links and formatting before uploading. I have to set it to offline mode before I start composing.

Debian

My debian server is still whirring away (noisy fans this summer but it's in a room I don't go in much). It handles email and Python Desktop Server and is also useful as a squid proxy that I can access from work through an SSH tunnel. I can use this to check the work firewall, to make sure it is possible to get in through the firewall. I might change server to a desktop pc as the laptop is a bit slow (166MHz pentium). That would allow me to make it a headless X server.

Object Desktop

I got fed up with animated fish using my CPU time in DesktopX. I use windowsblinds on the laptop to make it a bit more interesting but I don't think it was worth buying.

Intellimail

Still using it at home but I am tempted to move to IMAP + thunderbird like I use at work. Awaiting a home server decision.

Thunderbird

It's ok if a bit utilitarian when compared to Intellimail. However it handles IMAP, if a little flakily (it sometimes displays Inbox(3) but doesn't show the new messages).

Firefox

Love it. I only use IE for broken websites.

ITunes

May register for it today. If I can buy just the tracks I want and blow them to an audio CD then I see no need to buy CD's that are 75% filler material.

Furl

I'm beginning to see Furl as a place to look for websites that other people find interesting. When I run out of RSS articles I now try, e.g. this.

Motorbike

Sold for the asking price to a dealer who was advertising for CBR600's.

Intellimail has added a spam filter to their email client. It's really a simple white list thing but it's better than nothing. My previous spam filtering solution was SpamBayes but I had to reboot my server and after that SpamBayes refused to start. I could figure out the problem but my inclination is to bin it.

There is an interesting claim in the Intellimail email newsletter (which normally I would regard as spam):

Intellimail has added a spam filter to their email client. It's really a simple white list thing but it's better than nothing. My previous spam filtering solution was SpamBayes but I had to reboot my server and after that SpamBayes refused to start. I could figure out the problem but my inclination is to bin it.

There is an interesting claim in the Intellimail email newsletter (which normally I would regard as spam):

"We're proud to be the first email program in email history to integrate an anti-spam solution completely free of cost to its users."

This is for the version dated 2 June 2004, build 1488.

I think they should qualify this as a commercial email program as Thunderbird already has a much better spam filter. I still find Incredimail a more polished application than Thunderbird. At work I have problems with thunderbird occasionally telling me there are new message available but not listing them. I'd use Incredimail at work but:

• It does not support IMAP

• It add an adveret to every email I send: not very professional.

Thunderbird has also crashed on me a couple of times. I think this is ok when using IMAP and Maildir as I'm less likely to lose my email archives.

I've rearranged my work email again. I've gone for the following:

• Fetchmail to get email from pop accounts

• Exim still as MTA

• Courier IMAP

• Mozilla Thunderbird

This has some advantages over the previous setup:

• IMAP means my mail is stored on the linux box in simple Maildir format: each message is in a seperate file. No nasty proprietary databases to corrupt, I can use a nice fast search engine.

• I can change email clients very easily without having to migrate the email: Outlook, Outlook express and Thunderbird all work.

• It fits in with my plan to hyperlink project blog/wiki with email. I just knock up something to convert the email to html on the fly.

• I installed sqwebmail to give me remote access anywhere in the company (that side of the firewall). I don't think I can use that to serve up web pages to other people without opening up my email account. Sqwebmail works but it's not very pretty.

• Thunderbird has a built in spam filter so I don't need Spambayes. This is a nice simplification. Spambayes worked but it was very slow handling email with attachments.