The Case of the Missing Characters

[kwhiskers{]

On February 1, 2007, Mark Fraser wrote:
>
> The other option is to use Thunderbird and the webmail extension. This
> allows you to fetch email from different webmail services such as hotmail
> and yahoo, you can also send emails with hotmail too. Googlemail or Gmail
> can be set up to allow POP3 access which also can be used with Thunderbird.

That sounds nifty. I might give it a try sometime.

At the moment, I don't have Thunderbird. I wanted to try to stick with, um, 
er... how should I say, well, Linux programs, kind of. I do use firefox about 
80%, but konqueror only maybe 20% for surfing (some sites won't work with 
it), but I use kmail for everything.

I may be wrong, but somehow thunderbird seems like it comes from windows and 
people who navigate to linux want those old familiar programs. I've been more 
or less exclusively linux for about 10 years. Whenever i hear those questions 
about what programs are parallel to X in linux, it makes me think of this.

It's kind of a reason why I prefer fedora to other distros, too. The 
philosophy about 100% open source and free. Of course I have to use those 
codecs from mplayer.hu, otherwise fedora would be pretty useless, except for 
browsing the web and writing letters and emails, but I like the stand, 
because this forces people, companies... to think about their audience. I 
should not have to buy a certain product or brand (microsoft) in order to 
partake in the experience of the internet, or to use products and services of 
yet other companies.

It used to peeve me, but in the last couple of years, I have developed a sense 
of freedom and pride, perhaps, even, that I don't need their programs. I 
don't even need realplayer anymore, I noticed since fedora 6, since 
mplayerplug-in is now so reliable that it does just about everything. The 
fewer such programs I need, the more successful the linuxification process 
is. It is amazing how far things have come since redhat 5, when I began. In 
those days, linux was something to do after midnight when i was staying up 
late tinkering and wasting time. Now, i boot up XP once a month, just to load 
the recent updates and that's it! I don't need it for anything at all. I 
wonder why I even do that, but I think that I paid nearly $200 for it a 
couple of years ago... Usually when I am curious about something I don't want 
to wreck my linux system on, I will install the crap on windows just to have 
a look. You know, like sport illustrated's screensaver, for example...

Now, I really couldn't do email with mutt. I used pine in university in the 
early 80s. I like html. Nice to have a choice of font, some colour for 
accent, perhaps an embedded picture. Modern typesetting features like one 
expects from refined communication from people who have learnt how to use 
their machines and are past the elementary learning stage.

Anyway, not intending to put down thunderbird. after all, i do use it's 
brother, firefox as a mainstay.

-- 
kwhiskers{