I hope no-one ever rants at me about how Microsoft locks you into proprietry formats, or how they make it hard for you to use 3rd party alternatives to their own products, or how dirty and underhanded they are. I certainly hope no-one ever says that the people at Mozilla are any better.

I’ve been using Thunderbird for my mail for a while now. It’s not a bad program, it is still in it’s beta form, but very stable. I think I first started using it when it was recommened by one of the guys at Penny Arcade. So I’ve been using it a fair bit, for quite a while.. upgraded it a few times as they released new stable builds, dealt with annoying migration issues ( like having absolute addressing in it’s config file ), annoying functionality issues ( like not being able to open a new window from a link in an email ).. because it’s free software, it’s quite good, and someone other than Microsoft deserves a chance.

WRONG!

I’ve just spent 3 hours trying to export my mail from Thunderbird, so that I can use a program without any of the failings that a beta product might. Do you know what my end result is?
Nothing!

There is no ( zero ) export utility built into the program itself, this is okay though, because apparently the email is stored in the mbox format, which a lot of mail programs recognise. Except that Mozilla in their infinite pig-headedness have decided not to actually call the files .mbx, they have no extension, so if you have 400 mail folders, you can expect to have to add an extension to 400 files. Of course, then you need to download a third party ( 4th party? ) application to change the mbox format into something other progams recognise, because the file still cant be openned.

So I did this, and imported the email in a program I chose to use, and lo and behold, a good 1/2 of my emails have decided that their recieved date is the date & time they were imported.

So I’m back to Thunderbird, hoping like hell that the devs pull their fingers out and adopt a more friendly attitude.

In short, fuck you Mozilla, you just lost me.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 24th, 2004 at 10:20 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.