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I hate email.

June 28, 2005 By Glenn Turner

I do.

(The following is a long-winded, non-gaming related rant that sadly, has nowhere else to go.)

For years I've been using Eudora, and I've become increasingly frustrated by it. At first it was sheer annoyance, a problem with virus plugin ended up causing Eudora to pop up error alerts whenever a specific type of email was received, robbing focus away from whatever I was doing at the time to tell me that something wasn't really wrong. As someone who has shelled out cash to Qualcomm several times for the software, I was saddened to hear from Qualcomm tech support that there wasn't squat they could do for me, and that I was stuck with the alert.

Hooray.

So I installed 'Press the Fucking Button', which while it didn't quell the focus problem, it also allowed my email client to keep downloading email when I was on long trips.

See, I get a lot of email. Around 20-30 emails or so every 10 minutes. That adds up, quotas quickly hit 100% if I'm not monitoring my email on a daily basis.

I then recently migrated a lot of stationary from a Mac version of Eudora to PC, which also prompted alerts. Eudora's junk mail filter (which is really not too good) also occasionally would wig out and I'd have to reset it and start from scratch. It really wasn't that fun, but I've been using the software for years, I had over 600,000 emails saved (the majority of them work-related) and archived in different manners. And then Eudora started crashing whenever a specific type of embedded image came into my in box (despite the fact that I have HTML emails turned off), and then it started crashing if an email had a graphic attachment and got filtered to a specific mailbox.

Regardless, I kept using it because it's the closest thing to a decent, industrial strength email client available for Windows PCs. Well, I should say I kept using it until this weekend.

See, I came back from a Saturday night out exploring the ghost haunts in Chicago with some out-of-state friends to find that Eudora had crashed while I was away. No big surprise there. I boot it back up, it says it has to rebuild the table of contents for several mailboxes, which isn't too unusual. However, after about twenty minutes I note in the back of my head that it's taking a heck of a lot longer than usual, so I run off and do a few errands. I come back and realize that Eudora, and my entire computer, is much less responsive than usual. After desperately trying to click through a few mailboxes I check the filesizes on the newly recreated mailboxes.

Over 550,000MB. That's half a gig, for several mailboxes. Obviously there's no way that Eudora is gonna feasibly be able to let me browse through multiple mailboxes of this size and let me pair the inevitable number of duplicate emails causing such a bloated mailbox. It turns out that one email that Eudora kept choking on while filtering was causing the email to actually duplicate itself thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of times, so when the mailbox got corrupted and when Eudora rebuilt the mailbox, it rebuilt ALL these emails.

I fight with Eudora for three hours, trying to keep myself from falling asleep thanks to the work emergency that roused me from my two and a half-hour slumber this morning. I finally start to get one mailbox paired down, but ultimately realize:

Eudora's gotta go.

I then spend the bulk of my Sunday (apart from taking in an illustrious Neo-Futurists show) trying to migrate Eudora to Thunderbird. My problem with Thunderbird in prior migration attempts (when I was checking out email clients such as The Bat) was that it wasn't out of beta yet. I try to go the straight Eudora import method and realize that's not gonna work. As it turns out, Thunderbird ain't too good at reading Eudora's proprietary mbx system. So I follow the instructions to port Eudora's mailbox structure over to Thunderbird, and then spend hours, literally hours, waiting for Thunderbird to finish importing. I literally spent 10 hours waiting for it to finish processing. Not a fun time.

So now I'm running Thunderbird, and even though it's a bit clunky, clearly still has bugs (especially when marking and redirecting junk mail) and it's stationary system isn't nearly as good as Eudora's, I do feel more at ease with this client. I love the extensions - I've already installed QuickText to compensate for the poor stationary setup (aka Template), and a few other extensions (such as a quick 'show headers' button that should mimic the same feature I had in Eudora) but it's definitely slower than I'm used to. Mailboxes with a large number of emails take up to a minute to actually open, and the first time Thunderbird built a summary of the box ... well, I went off and had dinner.

This entire ordeal has taught me a few lessons though: I get too much email. Actually, that's not necessarily the lesson I learned, although it is part of it. I've taken email as an archival system for granted. Sure, old emails are well and good but the sheer volume that I was receiving is evidently too much of a load for any reasonable client. It's time for me to change the way I use email. I've already cut off a number of email reporting systems I had set up, and have stripped down a lot of them to just the bare minimum. I've turned off several debugging email systems, consolidated a few, redirected some addresses to other address, and just plain started trashing some accounts. It's time for the signal-to-noise ratio on my email accounts to improve, and the only person that can ultimately control that is myself - not an email client. Although I certainly wouldn't mind a spell check extension for Thunderbird that mimicked the real-time spell checking feature Eudora had.

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There are no comments available for ‘I hate email.’ yet!

#1 hobbie Jul 7, 2005 02:57am

I thought I had it bad at work...500+ a week at minimum.

Outlook is the only thing supported, though, so I don't know about all those fancy features.

#2 Stilgar Aug 27, 2005 03:45pm

I shun all forms of communication and technology.

#3 R. LeFeuvre Aug 28, 2005 08:14pm

Except forums obviously.