There are things in life where you ask yourself “why?”  This post is a small complaint on my part, but these types of things seem so obvious.

We have supported numerous e-mail programs over the years.  Microsoft Outlook towers over it’s competitors and rightly so.  The open source community has not come close to the functionality and intuitiveness of the Outlook interface.  Not all users are willing to spend $107 for the retail version of Outlook though.

Enter Mozilla Thunderbird for free.  Yes free.  Don’t let this sound cheap and low quality.  If Thunderbird is suited up with options it can take Outlook on pretty well.  There are options that provide Google Contacts look up, tasks, calendaring and newsfeeds.

Now my gripe with Thunderbird is more how it is packaged and not the functionality.  By default Thunderbird doesn’t display any graphics.  Pictures are stripped out of messages and only show text.  The reason is for security.  Computers can become infected with malware by the pictures.  So Mozilla goes to the extreme to employ safety.  Nice thought, but most of our customers dislike this.  You can get security and virus protection to get around that concern.  You already have that on your computer.  Right?

To fix this inconvenience you have to go into the advanced mode, look up some dork verbiage and change the boolean statement from true to false.  In other words, it is very inconvenient and will take a while before you locate a solution.  Usually the solution is to call us, St. Louis’ premiere technology solution provider Net-Net Tech, LLC (cheap plug) , or go to this website that has a very clear illustration on how to fix the problem.

This entry should go under the complaint category, but there isn’t one for that.

Email buries you daily with the endless delivery of SPAM, jokes, friendly forwards from co-workers, and then real email.  You’d almost think a schedule is necessary just to go through the email.  Forget responding.

Email isn’t going away anytime soon.  Social media is the star of the moment, but nothing beats email for conversation with a peer that is ongoing.

Now there’s a service available that may have you rethinking the value of email.  NudgeMail provides a reminder or task like service you create by, of all things, emailing NudgeMail.  For example, if you received an email for an event on Friday, you could forward the message to friday@nudgemail.com.  On Friday the forwarded message will be redelivered to you from NudgeMail as a reminder.

Take a look at the service and see if it is of value.

Larry Mendte, 51, was fined for hacking into a coworkers, Alycia Lane, 36, email.  He is also hit with 250 hours of community service.  Mr. Mendte was fired in June 2008 over the incident.

Both Mendte and Lane were co-anchors between 2004 and 2008 in Philadelphia, PA.  There was a bit of rivalry between the two.

It does not pay to be nosy.