Mamarati

So, I have finally given up on Apple Mail.

There’s lots of giving up going on around here lately, no?

So, anyway, I recently got a Dell because of the superior voice recognition software that came loaded with Vista. After the accident and still on my worst days or parts of even my good days, it is a miracle.

Switching over from my Mac, however, was not a blessing.

Jacob was excited about it, because that meant he got the Mac, which is a little iBook and it pretty much rocks.

I still have not gotten all my stuff off of it, however, so Jacob has been able to use it, but not really cart it around or whatnot. I haven’t let him take it to his dad’s because there’s always something on it that I think I need and so forth…

Anyway, it’s proving difficult to move my mail from Apple Mail to Outlook. I was going to use Outlook because the voice recognition is integrated into it and it’s so easy to answer my mail that way.

Except it’s not so easy to use Outlook. Of all programs I can think of — Outlook is the one I hate with the passion of a thousand suns. It’s always corrupting and doing weird things, and I have the latest version — 2007. WTH? There’s no friendly way to convert the mailboxes either. I mean, there’s several people who think they have a way, but those ways really do not do well in practice unless you have just a few folders and one box. I have POPs coming out of my butt and have thousands and thousands of pieces of mail, many with very large attachments… all dating back to the dawn of time and necessary for my work.

Such a pain.

Anyway, Outlook started doing that corrupt thing, telling me that things didn’t close properly (really, because I thought that’s what File –> Exit was for!) and chugging and churning away for eons every time I started it up. I thought the integration between Outlook and OneNote would work well, but I was disappointed with it in practice. I still love OneNote, but they’re not the good friends I thought the two programs would be.

I don’t know if I talked about the caving in that I already did over IE, either. In second place on the list of programs I hate — IE. I hate it with the passion of 999.9 suns. Again, I lost the navigation via voice thing, but I had to go back to Firefox. So, as a result, I decided to use Thunderbird for mail. Which I like much more. I installed the Lightning calendar plug-in and easily converted my events and appointments from Outlook. Imported my mail from Outlook somewhat — there were a few pieces that got jacked up and just look like empty mails… but they’re still in Outlook, so I’m just going to go deal with them over there when I have to and then delete them.

All in all, everything went well. The only thing I don’t really like about Firefox is that the folder list is so long when you’ve got multiple boxes. I would like the ability, like in Apple Mail, to click one folder and see everything that is in every Inbox all at once, and then split it up again by clicking the individual Inboxes if I want.

Back to Apple Mail. Boyfriend has his old G4 on his desk that he still uses now and again and I have a profile on the G4, so I realized that duh, I could just import the mailboxes to Apple Mail on that profile, thus freeing up the iBook for a clean sweep and fresh install for Jacob. And then I can just get on that computer should the need arise to reference those emails… at least that’s what I’m doing until a better solution exists.

And that’s what I’m doing right now. Sitting here while all that stuff moves over so that Boyfriend can deal with the nerdy bits of fresh installation later.