Blog: The Life Of A Supreme Ruler

A new year, a new operating system

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— orudge @ 05/01/2009 9:37 pm

So, it’s now 2009. I spent Christmas at my Grandad’s in North Wales, and new year with my brother and mum in mid-Wales. I’m back up to St Andrews now, since my first exam is on Saturday, and there is work to be done! Then I have another exam next Wednesday, and my final exam the Tuesday after that. Then, the following day, I shall be flying out to California to see my friend Rachel (who I stayed with back in June 2006). While I’m there, I’ll be visiting Google, which I’m quite excited about, and giving a Tech Talk (assuming I manage to get it written in between all these exams and so on!). It should be fun indeed, although I’ll also have to continue to do work on my senior honours project, for which a deliverable is due in February once I’m back.

In the mean time, I’m planning to finally move to Windows Vista, something which I’ve not really had any desire to do in the past. Having a new DirectX 10-capable graphics card, however (a GTX 260) is one incentive for me to upgrade, though, and I found that Vista isn’t too bad when you turn off a lot of the annoying stuff. So, I’m going to take the plunge and install it on my new hard disk. But one of my major issues is that Windows Vista doesn’t support/include Outlook Express, which I’ve used to manage my mail for some 10 years now – I have approximately half a million pieces of e-mail in my OE installation, which take up about 5GB of space in OE’s .dbx format. I have a couple of options here: I could move to Windows Mail (or Windows Live Mail), which is effectively a newer version of OE, or I could move to a client such as Thunderbird. I’ve used Thunderbird for years on my Mac for accessing various IMAP accounts, but it had (and still has) a few quirks that meant I didn’t really want to adopt it as my main e-mail client. But the alternative, Windows (Live) Mail, wouldn’t be ideal either, as not all that many programs support conversion from it. Plus, W(L)M stores each e-mail as an individual file, instead of one file per mail folder – with 500,000 e-mails, that’s highly inefficient! So, I’ve decided to move to Thunderbird.

I’ve got Thunderbird more or less set up in a way I like (although there are still a few niggly things, some of which I believe will be fixed in Thunderbird 3.0). The main issue then is converting all my existing e-mail. Thunderbird can import mail from Outlook Express, but it then loses read/unread status (I still have a lot of unread mail in my folders), and it doesn’t transfer things like reply/forwarded status in messages. So, I’ve decided to do things in a more laborious, but ultimately better, manner: copy all my messages to an IMAP server (which I’ve set up on obiwan), and copy them back – this way will preserve the attributes and so on. It is, however, a lot slower than the automatic conversion. It’ll take a while, but once it’s done, it’ll be worth it. Also, with Thunderbird, I’ll be able to stick my profile on my local server (obiwan), and share it between platforms, should I want to, which could be quite handy.

Anyway, I really should get back to revision – it’s funny how all these other distractions appear when one has exams or deadlines looming.

4 Comments to “A new year, a new operating system”

1. Oooh, Tech Talk. About WINE, I presume? And do you know if it will be posted online like they tend to?
   Wouldn’t it perhaps (have) be(en) easier to move to Outlook from Outlook Express? As a student I’m sure you can get your hands on it rather cheaply..?

   Comment by Stijn — 05/01/2009 @ 11:31 pm

2. The talk will be about Wine, yes. I’m not sure if it’ll be posted online – I’ll have to find out. If it’s not, then I may get my friend to record it. This all relies on me getting the talk finished, of course!

   As for moving to Outlook – it would have probably been easier, yes, and I do have a copy of it as part of Office 2007, but I don’t really like Outlook that much, and I figured it’d probably be better to move to something portable like Thunderbird – if I decide to move to Linux as a main operating system (which I quite possibly will at some point in the near future, or at least as dual-boot), then being able to use my Thunderbird profile on multiple operating systems will be very handy. (I could of course use Outlook Express under Wine, too, but a native solution is perhaps nicer!)

   Comment by orudge — 05/01/2009 @ 11:39 pm

3. Gmail could also have been an alternative, enables from searching and access from anywhere. With 7 gb space (and counting), that should be enough. I couldn’t do without the filter and label-options, wich now quite effectively divides my mail automatically to newsletter and notification folders so all the facebook mail, comment notifications and similar don’t clutter my inbox.

   Comment by Thor-Rune Hansen — 06/01/2009 @ 10:54 am

4. Well, there are a couple of reasons why I don’t want to use gmail as my main account:

   1) I like to have control over my own e-mail. This way, if anything goes wrong, I know it’s my fault. 😛

   2) I like to have my mail available offline, in a manner I can easily backup and archive myself. Not such an issue these days with always-on connections, but I still prefer to have it stored locally.

   3) I wouldn’t like to try to upload 500,000 e-mails to gmail. Copying them via IMAP to Thunderbird is slow enough!

   With regards to filters, folders, etc, I have had a pretty effective filtering system in OE, which I can replicate in Thunderbird, for nearly 10 years now. With the volume of mail I receive, I think a proper mail client is better for me. 🙂

   Comment by orudge — 09/01/2009 @ 10:24 am

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