Thunderbird is a Go!
Listening to: Stabilo - Flawed Design
It put up an ungodly fight that will be passed down in the epics of
generations, but I *finally* got Mozilla's email client to work.
12 hours--in one solid, continuous, frenzied, neck muscle crimping into
permanent excruciating shrug, harsh consonant laden, argh exclaiming,
endless google and MozillaZine forum archive raking session--just to
make the damn display work.
About another 12, in 4 hour chunks, on extensions and code tweaks to fix
broken things that I didn't manage to kill in the first epic.
Whew.
I can live with it now. For the moment. :)
To the geeks and non-geeks: Yes, like Firefox, Thunderbird can work
right out of the box. For normal people. Disabled people have very
special needs, and I usually have a hostile relationship with software,
because it won't adapt to me, and I *can't* adapt to it.
The gorgeous that is Firefox is that you can twist nearly anything into
and out of that program. It's more custom than any software, ever. But
extensions are the only way to do this easily. Otherwise, you need to
know how to seriously hardcore code. I can html. I can css too, baby.
But I can't do advanced hyper programmer type coding.
Thunderbird is nowhere near as advanced as Firefox, both in the
customising options of the code it comes with, and in the stable of
extensions out there. Most of the things I needed to do, just so I could
read a message, I had to go find code to make happen, and then it was
trail and error. Getting the code where it needed to go, and finding if
the code did anything at all (99% of the time it did nothing).
Even normal users will find that options are scattered at random all
over the place, making it a real hunt and peck to turn anything on and
off. To get plain text email, you can't just turn off html. You have to
switch on this and switch off that, and go over here and do this, and
flip the rock over behind the waterfall, and then throw this unlabelled
lever twice--but only on a quarter moon, if you have a red dress. It was
like playing a corrupt version of Myst, and that game wasn't even fun
the first time.
Anyway, it's far from perfect, but I have it where I can use my mail.
And even in this flawed state, it's a huge step up from Eudora. Huge.
Oh, and details of my mods will be upcoming, in case anyone might find
them handy.
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