Thunderbird Gets Even Better

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned an app called FreePOPs that allows email clients like Thunderbird to access web-based email accounts. Well, forget about that. Yesterday I decided to take a look at Blogzilla, "a weblog about Mozilla," for the first time in several months to see if a new post had finally appeared (the last update was in early December). Sure enough, Jonathan had written back on April 10th about a Thunderbird extension imaginatively called Web-Mail that does the same thing as FreePOPs, only much faster and completely transparently. Plug in the Web-Mail extension along with an auxiliary extension for your web-based service (currently limited to Hotmail, Yahoo, Lycos, and Mail.com), and you can retrieve mail as easily as you can from any other POP3 service.

Now that I'm using Thunderbird for my Yahoo Mail accounts as well as my Gmail account, I've decided to remove my RSS feeds and go back to using Firefox's LiveBookmarks. So for quick browsing (without waiting for all the feeds to load), I'm reverting to K-Meleon 0.9 (Gecko-based) and Avant Browser 10.1 beta (IE-based).

By the way, I've finally started using a few Thunderbird extensions, aside from Web-Mail. The Delete Junk Context Menu is absolutely indespensible for me (faster and easier than having Thunderbird automatically move spam to the junk folder, then deleting them from there), and the Contacts Sidebar is a basic feature of Outlook Express that, for whatever reason, Thunderbird doesn't have.

Oh, one more thing. I noticed a few days ago that it's 2005, so I finally got an optical mouse. To avoid a potentially fatal shock to my nervous system, I did not buy the Logitech dual-laser gaming mouse glaring seductively at me from the top shelf. Instead, I went with a basic, but comfortable, IBM optical wheel-mouse. So now I'm faced with a new problem: what to do with my vast collection of ball-mice and mousepads.