Email program

Better believe it. My impression is, from reading the Thunderbird
newsgroup, many TB users do text only. That's fine, it's their choice.
Many times their solution seems to be to ask you to dump the HTML
email, and go text. If that is the way of the future, then why aren't
all the web email programs going that way?


I have very limited knowledge about all these various email clients, and
I use Thunderbird only for a dummy email account and a few subscribed
newsgroups (and I don't post that much).

However, I do know that there are at least two methods of composing HTML
emails. The first method is to treat HTML emails (e.g. newsletters)
exactly the same as of developing Web pages, and in this case, emails
are composed by using complied HTLM coding (sometimes as a template),
CSS formatting, and images are stored in server and downloaded upon the
reader’s permission and using CSS for formatting. This is the only way
that can have a more consistent result of displaying an HTML email by
various email clients.

And the second method is to use the built-in functions of email clients,
and in this case, I’d think that each email client, more or less, is
guilty of incorporating their own proprietary codes and their own
“security philosophy� which is why that the first method is being used
by most business.

My limited use of Thunderbird did find the cross-posting issue that you
mentioned, but since it’s a free product, I don’t really ask too much.
My tolerance to bugs/issues/problems is measured by a product’s price
tag, and that is, the higher price of a product, the lower of the
tolerance level, and vice versa.

On 6/22/14 5:19 AM, Keith Nuttle wrote:
On 6/21/2014 11:14 PM, Ken Springer wrote:
On 6/21/14 7:00 AM, Keith Nuttle wrote:
On 6/21/2014 8:27 AM, Ken Springer wrote:
er see any of the issues any particular program has.

I don't mind if/when issues are found. It's not fixing them, yet have
the time to introduce new things, that's driven me away. And
apparently, Mozilla is no longer interested in funding further
development of TB, just fix


The development of TB is continuing, if you will read the Mozilla
information sites, not the Microsoft sites.

I read the Mozilla newsgroups for Calendar, TB, FF, and .general.

The current Thunderbird is 24.6.0 it is based on Gecko 30 the same level
of development as the current Firefox, The current Firefox is 30 based
on Gecko 30.

TB 31 based on Gecko 31 is scheduled to be released July 22, 2014. It
probably will be released as 24.7.0, so that the corporate user do not
have to do as much checking.

I posted above and said I had used TB for HTML messages for nearly a
decade. I have been use HTML, because I like seeing the pictures in the
body and being able to use formatting like bullets, bold, italics, etc

And you've never run into a single problem? What about the EXIF bug,
where TB improperly handles images where height is greater than width?
Or, after inserting a smiley, and a limited selection no less, you can't
do any more typing other than the return key? TB has never thrown any
of your mailboxes away? --- Thank God for backups.

Or, what about after repairing a newsgroup, all messages are underlined
and selecting all, mark all messages read, does not mark them as read?
What about marking cross posted messages as read in all groups when i
gets marked as read in one group? Someone posted about that, probably
in the TB Mozilla group, that it was broken in something like TB 2 or 3
and it's still not fixed.

Here's a list of things that happen with my install, I don't think I've
ever posted this before.

� After Smiley is inserted, you cannot add any spaces.
�
� Interspersed reply. Press return at the end of a paragraph.
Backspace over the line, quoted paragraph is not returned to the way it
was when you start.
�
� Search really sucks
�
� Thunderbird will throw away messages. Tried moving 4 messages
to a dedicated folder, and all disappeared. Search sure doesn't find them.
�
� Repair a newsgroup, and all threads are underlined when collapsed
�
� Press reply, font selection is not consistent.
�
� Option/Control Z restores more than intended
�
� You can never tell what color your text will be when doing
interspersed replies. Do keystrokes, backspace, manually place the
cursor, never a consistent color
�
� If you select a portion of a message to reply to, and that
portion has more than one color, the reply does not retain the original
message's colors
�
� Spell checker obscures part of the message, so you cannot read
the context of the message. Possibly Mac only.
�
� Gel All Messages does not retrieve newly posted messages which
are retrieved immediately by selecting a different newsgroup, then back
to the original newsgroup.
�
� Calendar tab loses name when opened in new window than
reopened in first window
�
� Folder pane list jumps up one line when 100% of a folder's
messages are deleted.
�
� An appointment that spans overnight gets listed twice. This
may be due to date change.
�
� Blank entries in the message page area when collapsing threads
�
� Sometimes, you can't backspace in a reply.
�
� Rt. click on an attachment in the compose window does not open
the document, but double clicking works.

Not listed is the occasion cursor action where, when the cursor is in
the middle of the line but at the end of the paragraph, if you press the
left arrow key, the cursor goes up 2 lines, and to the right end of that
line.

Also not in the list, is if you are doing interspersed typing, and
you've selected a color other than default, move the cursor away from
the end of the line vertically, and then go back, you are not typing in
the other color other than the default.

There's also been posts noting that you can be typing in a compose
window, and the program simply stops responding. Many people say this
doesn't happen. But I'll have the Force Quit window open (Mac
equivalent of Task Manager) and I can sit there and watch the OS tell me
TB is not responding. Which I already know as I'm staring at the
spinning beach ball (Windows spinning hour glass cursor) waiting for TB
to figure out what to do next, and the user is in limbo.

I'm not a TB beta tester, I'm a TB user, and since Mozilla doesn't want
to fix anything, just add new features, I could now care less about
tracking any of these down. I did follow the standard suggestion,
create a new profile. No change. And if the answer is to create a new
profile, all that really does is confirm there's problems.

I have better things to do with my computer than report issues. I want
the software to work, and not have to find workarounds. And these days,
I'm more than happy to pay for something that works instead of farting
around with something that doesn't.

I think the message linked in Caver1's post here,
is the Mozilla
announcement I was thinking of. Notice, at least in the quote, there is
no mention of fixing bugs.

So it's on a 6 month release cycle. Did you look at the latest release
notes? What was fixed, maybe a half dozen security issues, but no bug
fixes. Whoopee! That's not much of a change.

I remember when I first discovered Mozilla. Lots of projects. Now,
it's just FF and SeaMonkey from what I see. I don't consider TB to be a
project any more.



I do not recall having these problems. In the past ten years there have
been some builds with minor problems that have been resolved with the
next build. By comparison with other software, TB is no worse that any
other piece of software, There are more frustration with MS Word, than TB.

Like any program and bugs, so much depends on how the user utilizes the
program. Word is far more complex than TB, I'd expect more problems
just acknowledging that fact.

As far as the compose problem I am a touch typist, and a poor speller,
so have not noted these problems. I write a lot of informational emails,
where the email comes from minor research projects, so the emails evolve
rather than are written.

I keep very few emails in the inbox and Sent, as I have a couple of
dozen subdirectories to store keep them. I frequently compact the
files, and delete unwanted items.

Likewise, and I use the filters to put the email in the appropriate
subdirectory. And I also archive when a subdirectory gets too large for
my taste.

The about:Config file is out of the box, I have made only one or two
minor changes. In my installation I have the following addons"
Auto Resize Image 0.13.3
Clippings 4.1
ImportExportTools 2.8.0.4
Lightning 2.6.6
MarkAll Read Button 0.6
Morefuntions for AddressBook 0.6.11.2
Quicknote 0.7.3
www.tran 5.2

The only add-on we have in common is Lightning, and the TB update
process only updated my Lightning to 2.6.2. I have to consider the
difference is which OS TB is installed on. All but 3 of my add-on just
affect how TB looks, they don't "do" anything to the email itself.

I used to use Auto Resize Image long ago, but there was some problem
with it that I've forgotten.

As I said I am aware of no problems with TB, that hinder my personal use
of TB.

That may be due to you using the Windows version and I'm using the Mac
version. That difference alone negates any conclusions about bugs and
any operation of any software program. My impression of the past is
Mozilla has always had a problem finding someone that knows enough about
OS X to do the job.

PS: If you read the old news releases, when Mozilla restructured their
developers, they did not eliminate anything. What they did was shift
the focus of their inhouse and outside development groups. As I
understand the inhouse group is actually are paid, while the outside
groups are volunteers. By shifting the costly development of new
functions for their products to the outside developers, they can let
their inhouse developers focus one security problems and structural
problems. Or in other words their research is being handled be the
volunteer who now do not need to be burdened with the day to day
operations which are handled by their in house group.

From discussions on the Mozilla newsgroups, there are no inhouse people
for TB anymore. That last one went away a couple years ago. It's been
speculated that the current outside developers do not include any of the
original developers, so really know little to nothing about the program
code.

But again, talking about development of new things says nothing about
fixing existing things. :-(

Presuming Alek Trishan and John will read this post... Have to get
ready for work tomorrow, look for replies to your posts tomorrow night.


--
Ken
Mac OS X 10.8.5
Firefox 25.0
Thunderbird 24.6.0
"My brain is like lightning, a quick flash
and it's gone!"

On 6/22/14 12:34 PM, John wrote:
On Sat, 21 Jun 2014 21:14:18 -0600, Ken Springer
wrote:

snipped

?
? Gel All Messages does not retrieve newly posted messages which are
retrieved immediately by selecting a different newsgroup, then back to
the original newsgroup.

You do know that "the Internet" isn't one vast monolithic machine but
is actually a massive mess of interconnected tiny little boxes that
have to talk to each other?

Yep.

Your sent message needs time to propagate from the boxes of your ISP
into the vast web of other boxes, some of which are the newsservers
you read from.
Even if your ISP *is* your newsserver the email-out box may not be
the NNTP-server box, and even if they are the same box they will be
running two sets of software over the messages you send, one of which
can only run once the message has been accepted and stored by the
other.

In short: email and USENet are not instantaneous.

I'm not expecting instantaneous, but I'd think the "lag" from the same
server to be mostly identical regardless of how you attempt to retrieve
the message.

Let's say I have this newsserver setup:

news.invalid.org
newsgroup A
newsgroup B
newsgroup C
newsgroup D


I write and post a message to C. If I click on B, then back to C, the
message comes in. But, if I post to C, then click on news.invalid.org
and say Get Messages, and then go back to C, the message is not
retrieved. Eventually it does show up. Maybe there's something going
on the background at news.invalid.org that affects this, but on the
surface it's making no sense to my why.

Try any other newsreader software and you'll probably get the same
lag.

This is one thing on the to do list before abandoning TB.



To the Original Poster:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special...zi lla-search

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compari..._email_clients

You should be able to find something nice in there. The middle cited
site is just for information and fun.
And to show that not all email is Microsoft or Gmail.
J.



--
Ken
Mac OS X 10.8.5
Firefox 25.0
Thunderbird 24.6.0
"My brain is like lightning, a quick flash
and it's gone!"

On 6/22/14 10:30 AM, Alek Trishan wrote:
Ken Springer has written on 6/21/2014 11:14 PM:
snip

Hi, Alek,

Before you read this, know that I have no add-ons installed that affect
the composition window.

And you've never run into a single problem? What about the EXIF bug,
where TB improperly handles images where height is greater than width?
Or, after inserting a smiley, and a limited selection no less, you can't
do any more typing other than the return key? TB has never thrown any
of your mailboxes away? --- Thank God for backups.

I've never run into any of those. Of course, I post almost all messages
in plain text. Are you using HTML?

HTML for email only, plain text for newsgroups, no binary newsgroups.

Or, what about after repairing a newsgroup, all messages are underlined
and selecting all, mark all messages read, does not mark them as read?

??? SOME messages are underlined -- the first one in a collapsed thread.

Threaded view, all the "first" messages are underlined, indicating
unread messages. Select All, Mark thread as read, and the underlines do
not disappear. But if I expand all the threads, Select All, and then
Mark thread as read, it works. Or something similar.

I've gotten too disgusted overall to be very detailed about any of it.
Just too many issues and I just don't care anymore.

Marking works perfectly here.

I've often wondered if the problems are related to the coding for a
specific OS. I'm on a Mac, you're on Windows. Usually when I mention
this possibility, most don't want to consider that as a possibility.

What about marking cross posted messages as read in all groups when i
gets marked as read in one group? Someone posted about that, probably
in the TB Mozilla group, that it was broken in something like TB 2 or 3
and it's still not fixed.

Agreed. Annoying.

Here's a list of things that happen with my install, I don't think I've
ever posted this before.

� After Smiley is inserted, you cannot add any spaces.

A graphical smiley or a :-) ??? (I see spaces!!)

Graphical smiley in HTML email. You see spaces????? Where?

� Interspersed reply. Press return at the end of a paragraph.
Backspace over the line, quoted paragraph is not returned to the way it
was when you start.

Doesn't backspace delete characters?

This is what I get for simply cutting and pasting notes that mean
something to me. LOL

HTML email, and you have a quoted paragraph. For me, the quote
marks/character is a straight vertical line, not the "" character in
text messages. Place the cursor at the end of a sentence in the
paragraph, press "return". The paragraph breaks, as does the quote
mark/line, and type a few characters. Use the backspace key to delete
the characters you just typed and the initial return keypress.
Everything should be back to the way it was displayed when you first
pressed the return key. But, it's not, there is white space inserted
between the lines of text, and the quote line is broken.

� Search really sucks

Compared to? I use "Search Messages" from the context menu.

To be honest, I don't remember what I was referring to here.

� Thunderbird will throw away messages. Tried moving 4 messages to a
dedicated folder, and all disappeared. Search sure doesn't find them.

Never saw that one! And I move messages all the time. What is a
"dedicated folder"??

I've had TB toss the entire Inbox from one email account more than one
time. Thank God for Time Machine. I just restore the inbox from a
backup, and I have the server set to keep messages for that account for
14 days, so I eventually get missing messages back.

"Dedicated folder" or folders are just the folders where mail from
specific senders are sent to using filters. Mail from Sally goes to her
folder, Tom's mail goes to his, etc.

� Repair a newsgroup, and all threads are underlined when collapsed

Indicates that there are messages to be seen when expanded.

Correct. But immediately after I repair the newsgroup, marking the
thread as read does not remove the lines unless the thread is first
expanded, IIRC.

� Press reply, font selection is not consistent.

???

More cut and paste. LOL

HTML email, you have a default font selected for your typing. Sometimes
TB pays attention to that, sometimes it doesn't.

� Option/Control Z restores more than intended

How does TB know what you intended? Give an example, please.

TB's restore works different than any other program I've used.
Highlight a selection of text, delete. Pause a few seconds, highlight
text that immediately followed the first deleted text. Repeat again.
Press Option/CTRL-Z and TB will restore all three deletions at once. In
every other program I've used it would take pressing the Option/CTRL-Z
key combinations 3 times to get all the deleted text back. Damned
irritating when you only wanted to restore the last deleted text, not
all the deleted text.

� You can never tell what color your text will be when doing
interspersed replies. Do keystrokes, backspace, manually place the
cursor, never a consistent color

I can: black!

LOL One thing that's nice about colored text in HTML, it's easier for
me to spot the new reply from previous replies, especially in
interspersed messages.

� Gel All Messages does not retrieve newly posted messages which are
retrieved immediately by selecting a different newsgroup, then back to
the original newsgroup.

No idea what you mean?

Check my reply to John he


� Folder pane list jumps up one line when 100% of a folder's messages
are deleted.

Not here.

� Sometimes, you can't backspace in a reply.

What computer? What OS?

OS X 10.8.5 Mountain Lion. This is one of the rarer things.

� Rt. click on an attachment in the compose window does not open the
document, but double clicking works.

R-click, open works for me.

Not listed is the occasion cursor action where, when the cursor is in
the middle of the line but at the end of the paragraph, if you press the
left arrow key, the cursor goes up 2 lines, and to the right end of that
line.

Bizarre!

There's also been posts noting that you can be typing in a compose
window, and the program simply stops responding. Many people say this
doesn't happen. But I'll have the Force Quit window open (Mac
equivalent of Task Manager) and I can sit there and watch the OS tell me
TB is not responding. Which I already know as I'm staring at the
spinning beach ball (Windows spinning hour glass cursor) waiting for TB
to figure out what to do next, and the user is in limbo.

Oh, Mac. Explains a lot. :-)

:P LOL It has really gotten bad in the last month. :-(

I think that you have reported issues found only in the Mac version of
TB!! It would help others if you stated that at the outset.

Oh, I think this is an excellent possibility. The list is just copy and
paste from a desktop sticky note, and wasn't intended to submitted as
written as any kind of bug report.

When using the vertical bar/backslash key, have you ever had TB give you
this display after collapsing all threads at once?
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ujz1rnlkb...37-_vSmxkX3kxa

I'm not a TB beta tester, I'm a TB user, and since Mozilla doesn't want
to fix anything, just add new features, I could now care less about
tracking any of these down. I did follow the standard suggestion,
create a new profile. No change. And if the answer is to create a new
profile, all that really does is confirm there's problems.

Does Apple have a nice email client? Why aren't you using it?

Apple Mail comes with the OS, but it's not as flexible/customizable as
TB or Outlook. I got really "spoiled" with what I could do with Outlook
2003, so for a long time after getting this Mac, I did my email via a VM
running XP Pro and Outlook 2003 until I discovered TB. Really had high
hopes of never using a different email client other than TB.

But, all these little things finally added up "to the straw that broke
the camel's back". MS doesn't sell the Mac version of Outlook
separately, so bought Office for Mac just to get a copy of Outlook.

And the updates of TB and Firefox that break add-ons I've installed, and
now have to find new solutions each time, has me seriously looking at
other browsers, notably Pale Moon and/or Maxthon.

--
Ken
Mac OS X 10.8.5
Firefox 25.0
Thunderbird 24.6.0
"My brain is like lightning, a quick flash
and it's gone!"

WLM-Tester wrote:
A free program from Microsoft called Windows Live Mail 2012 is another
option for emails. You specifically asked for emails and so I
specifically mentioned a program for emails only. Not for anything else.

The reason I recommend for emails is because most corporate and serious
emails are sent in HTML format and so WLM is very suitable for it.

It depends very much on the intelligence of the sender.

Paul

On 6/22/14 9:27 PM, xfile wrote:


Better believe it. My impression is, from reading the Thunderbird
newsgroup, many TB users do text only. That's fine, it's their choice.
Many times their solution seems to be to ask you to dump the HTML
email, and go text. If that is the way of the future, then why aren't
all the web email programs going that way?


I have very limited knowledge about all these various email clients, and
I use Thunderbird only for a dummy email account and a few subscribed
newsgroups (and I don't post that much).

However, I do know that there are at least two methods of composing HTML
emails. The first method is to treat HTML emails (e.g. newsletters)
exactly the same as of developing Web pages, and in this case, emails
are composed by using complied HTLM coding (sometimes as a template),
CSS formatting, and images are stored in server and downloaded upon the
reader’s permission and using CSS for formatting. This is the only way
that can have a more consistent result of displaying an HTML email by
various email clients.

And the second method is to use the built-in functions of email clients,
and in this case, I’d think that each email client, more or less, is
guilty of incorporating their own proprietary codes and their own
“security philosophy� which is why that the first method is being used
by most business.

My limited use of Thunderbird did find the cross-posting issue that you
mentioned, but since it’s a free product, I don’t really ask too much.
My tolerance to bugs/issues/problems is measured by a product’s price
tag, and that is, the higher price of a product, the lower of the
tolerance level, and vice versa.

Even if it's free, it needs to be useable for me. And we'll have
different definitions of useability here.

If I'm using free programs X & Y to get a feel for how that type of
software works, I'll more or less ignore bugs or issues I may find.
But, if I decide to use one or both of those programs, and those issues
get in the way of getting something done, I get rid of them and look for
something that does. Libre Office is one of those. Finally have gone
somewhere else.

I've a friend that just learned that lesson. She kept fighting with
Open Office for some projects at work. Always complaining this or that
doesn't work. I bought her a copy of Serif's Page Plus, and she hasn't
touched Open Office since for work. But now she's got a company
computer, and is being told to use MS Publisher. And she hates
Publisher. LOL

These days, I would rather pay for something that works instead of
messing around trying to make it work. And that's why I'm using a 5.5
year old Mac and not a 1 year old Win7/Win8 machine that kicks the Mac's
butt for speed. As far as the OS is concerned, it just works. No
continuous worries over malware, security patches, etc. It just works.
:-)


--
Ken
Mac OS X 10.8.5
Firefox 25.0
Thunderbird 24.6.0
"My brain is like lightning, a quick flash
and it's gone!"

On Tue, 24 Jun 2014 18:50:36 +0100, WLM-Tester wrote:

Content-Type: text/html;
charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

HTMLHEAD/HEAD
BODY dir=3Dltr
DIV dir=3Dltr
DIV style=3D"FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'Trebuchet MS'; COLOR: =
#350f00"
DIV /DIV

You should read Albasani's Terms of Use regarding posting in HTML and
providing a working e-mail. is NOT your address, but I
will certainly send an e-mail to regarding your
postings... "Good Guy".

--
s|b

On Sat, 21 Jun 2014 18:00:24 -0500, Leo wrote:

I vote for Windows Live Mail. You can access multiple email accounts
without a problem.

Big deal. Mozilla Thunderbird supports multiple accounts too.

--
s|b

Nil wrote:
On 24 Jun 2014, "WLM-Tester" wrote in
alt.comp.os.windows-8:

And how do you measure the intelligence of the sender?

Use of HTML in a text-only newsgroup is one measure.


Exactly.

The default configuration for CleanFeed, states that
microsoft.* was the only hierarchy that is supposed to
have HTML turned on. And that's because microsoft.* started
as a private server, which eventually got connections to USENET.
In the same way as some Mozilla server and Adobe server did
(and were later removed at the source).

Since the Microsoft forums had HTML turned on for some reason,
it was considered necessary to make an exception.

For the rest of the global USENET hierarchy (Big-8),
text-only is the way to go. And this is what the
default configuration in the CleanFeed source suggests
(as an impartial source of information). If you didn't
modify CleanFeed, and used it out of the box, it
would have rejected Good Guy's post.

The only reason you find newsreaders with HTML capability,
is because they're dual role programs. They were
email programs first, and USENET readers second.
(Which is why some famous ones of those, can't even
quote properly.) For programs which were only USENET
readers, those were also text-only. At least the
three or four I used on Unix boxes were that way.
The source file size of a text-only newsreader,
takes just a handful of files in a single directory.
The mammoth 60,000 source file builds for the modern
tools, speak to the wide range of features they attempt
to cover (one of which is having all the browser code,
stuffed into email/newsreader). The browser code, and
HTML engine, far and away, take more code than the
handful of USENET reader protocol files.

Paul

And we'll have different definitions of useability here.

Yes, and also for time and cost allocation.

I've a friend that just learned that lesson. She kept fighting with
Open Office for some projects at work. Always complaining this or that
doesn't work. I bought her a copy of Serif's Page Plus, and she hasn't
touched Open Office since for work. But now she's got a company
computer, and is being told to use MS Publisher. And she hates
Publisher. LOL

I don't know your friend's work but what I know is that both Serif's
Page Plus and MS Publisher are publishing software and they are not in
the same product category as of OpenOffice, LibreOffice, MS Office, and
other "office suites".

Office suites and publishing software are designed with different
fundamental purposes and they should be used for their designed purpose.

Her problem, in my humble opinion, is associated more with using a wrong
tool than the usability of a tool.

Also, I don't know anything about Serif's Page Plus, but if it's for
business use, I would think that they should invest more than MS
Publisher.

This is what I meant for time and cost allocation.

These days, I would rather pay for something that works instead of
messing around trying to make it work.

I agreed. Having witnessed the computer industry's "extremely slow"
evolution and the same old cumbersome troubleshooting over the decades,
I felt pessimistic about its future (which in part, I felt it deserved
it) and that is also one of the major reasons for ordinary consumers
would not hesitate to abandon computers with any viable alternatives,
and alienate themselves from brand names associated with computers.

And that's why I'm using a 5.5
year old Mac and not a 1 year old Win7/Win8 machine that kicks the Mac's
butt for speed. As far as the OS is concerned, it just works. No
continuous worries over malware, security patches, etc. It just works.
:-)

Among other things, that is the tradeoff between a wall-garden (no pun
intended) and so-called "freedom" and "flexibility".

In the early days, a "wall-garden" approach was not feasible and
applicable, since mass adoption was critically needed by the general
public and it could only be achieved by Wintel's approach of using all
interested parties to provide versatility and economies of scale at the
cost of consistent quality, compatibility, stabilizability, and user
experience.

In the late 1990's and early 2000's when the mass adoption was achieved,
it should have moved to address those issues by adopting some of
wall-garden's concepts, similar to what Apple have done for using
Intel-based chips to broaden its versatility, except it's from the other
way around.

Now that we are moving into the device age and everyone is using, more
or less, a wall-garden model.

It's just like the economy's model, neither unregulated capitalism nor
pure blood socialism is good for common citizens, motivated business,
and society, so by and large, most countries are moving, gradually, to a
regulated capitalism (a.k.a. market economy) which is the middle ground
of the both.

My two cents.


On 6/25/2014 2:03 AM, Ken Springer wrote:
On 6/22/14 9:27 PM, xfile wrote:


Better believe it. My impression is, from reading the Thunderbird
newsgroup, many TB users do text only. That's fine, it's their choice.
Many times their solution seems to be to ask you to dump the HTML
email, and go text. If that is the way of the future, then why aren't
all the web email programs going that way?


I have very limited knowledge about all these various email clients, and
I use Thunderbird only for a dummy email account and a few subscribed
newsgroups (and I don't post that much).

However, I do know that there are at least two methods of composing HTML
emails. The first method is to treat HTML emails (e.g. newsletters)
exactly the same as of developing Web pages, and in this case, emails
are composed by using complied HTLM coding (sometimes as a template),
CSS formatting, and images are stored in server and downloaded upon the
reader’s permission and using CSS for formatting. This is the only way
that can have a more consistent result of displaying an HTML email by
various email clients.

And the second method is to use the built-in functions of email clients,
and in this case, I’d think that each email client, more or less, is
guilty of incorporating their own proprietary codes and their own
“security philosophy� which is why that the first method is being used
by most business.

My limited use of Thunderbird did find the cross-posting issue that you
mentioned, but since it’s a free product, I don’t really ask too much.
My tolerance to bugs/issues/problems is measured by a product’s price
tag, and that is, the higher price of a product, the lower of the
tolerance level, and vice versa.

Even if it's free, it needs to be useable for me. And we'll have
different definitions of useability here.

If I'm using free programs X & Y to get a feel for how that type of
software works, I'll more or less ignore bugs or issues I may find. But,
if I decide to use one or both of those programs, and those issues get
in the way of getting something done, I get rid of them and look for
something that does. Libre Office is one of those. Finally have gone
somewhere else.

On 6/24/14 5:45 PM, xfile wrote:
And we'll have different definitions of useability here.

Yes, and also for time and cost allocation.

I've a friend that just learned that lesson. She kept fighting with
Open Office for some projects at work. Always complaining this or that
doesn't work. I bought her a copy of Serif's Page Plus, and she hasn't
touched Open Office since for work. But now she's got a company
computer, and is being told to use MS Publisher. And she hates
Publisher. LOL

I don't know your friend's work but what I know is that both Serif's
Page Plus and MS Publisher are publishing software and they are not in
the same product category as of OpenOffice, LibreOffice, MS Office, and
other "office suites".

Office suites and publishing software are designed with different
fundamental purposes and they should be used for their designed purpose.

Her problem, in my humble opinion, is associated more with using a wrong
tool than the usability of a tool.

You are so right on the money. I have to attribute some of her use of
Open Office to be a spin-off of people thinking MS Word is the be all
end all for everything. And in her case, getting her to try something
else is difficult at best. To get her away for Open Office, I drug her
to a local library course on MS Publisher. (Crappy course, BTW.) It
opened her eyes, and she started saying she needed a page layout
program. So when Serif offered me 75% discount on X6, current version
is X7, I bought 2 copies and gave her one. She is so happy with it, but
is POed she has to move to Publisher.

I keep hinting she should try one of the other free office packages, but
no success as of yet. I did get her to stop trying to send people .doc
and .docx files created by Open Office when I sent her screenshots of
how the documents sometimes looked when viewed in Word 2007. Now she
does PDF, but her new work computer has Office 2010, so I don't know
what she will do personally.

Also, I don't know anything about Serif's Page Plus, but if it's for
business use, I would think that they should invest more than MS
Publisher.

I'm sure companies use Publisher because it comes with Office Pro and
other iterations of Office. I suspect companies have this policy
because TPTB and IT people know nothing about actually using the
software, and the amount of time that can be wasted using Office when
other software probably matches their needs better.

In the course I mentioned, I just sat there and fooled around, and after
about 15 minutes the instructor looked at me and said something to the
effect she didn't think I needed the course. To which I agreed, I'd
used Publisher when it was a standalone product in the Windows for
Workgroups days. And I found some of the bugs that existed back then
still exist in the version of Publisher that comes with Office 2007.
Sad, isn't it?

This is what I meant for time and cost allocation.

These days, I would rather pay for something that works instead of
messing around trying to make it work.

I agreed. Having witnessed the computer industry's "extremely slow"
evolution and the same old cumbersome troubleshooting over the decades,
I felt pessimistic about its future (which in part, I felt it deserved
it) and that is also one of the major reasons for ordinary consumers
would not hesitate to abandon computers with any viable alternatives,
and alienate themselves from brand names associated with computers.

And that's why I'm using a 5.5
year old Mac and not a 1 year old Win7/Win8 machine that kicks the Mac's
butt for speed. As far as the OS is concerned, it just works. No
continuous worries over malware, security patches, etc. It just works.
:-)

Among other things, that is the tradeoff between a wall-garden (no pun
intended) and so-called "freedom" and "flexibility".

Sadly, MS is moving to the walled-garden model tool. So with each
release of a new OS, you get to do less and less when it comes to
customization. Apple came out with new high end hardware for their
computer line, and my impression of Mavericks was it may be somewhat of
a reversal to the walled-garden approach. But I have no real idea about
that, I've not heard of anything in Mavericks that has enticed me to
upgrade.

In the early days, a "wall-garden" approach was not feasible and
applicable, since mass adoption was critically needed by the general
public and it could only be achieved by Wintel's approach of using all
interested parties to provide versatility and economies of scale at the
cost of consistent quality, compatibility, stabilizability, and user
experience.

In the late 1990's and early 2000's when the mass adoption was achieved,
it should have moved to address those issues by adopting some of
wall-garden's concepts, similar to what Apple have done for using
Intel-based chips to broaden its versatility, except it's from the other
way around.

Now that we are moving into the device age and everyone is using, more
or less, a wall-garden model.

At least Android is Linux based, so there should/could be some
differences between manufacturers. Whereas Win 7 is Win 7 is Win 7
regardless of system manufacturer.

snip


--
Ken
Mac OS X 10.8.5
Firefox 25.0
Thunderbird 24.6.0
"My brain is like lightning, a quick flash
and it's gone!"

On Tue, 24 Jun 2014 18:35:13 -0600, Ken Springer
wrote:

So when Serif offered me 75% discount on X6, current version
is X7, I bought 2 copies and gave her one. She is so happy with it,


Are you a WordPerfect fan? Welcome to the club!



but
is POed she has to move to Publisher.



Why does she have to do that? I've done desktop publishing on
WordPerfect and it worked very well for it.

On 6/24/14 6:36 PM, Ken Blake, MVP wrote:
On Tue, 24 Jun 2014 18:35:13 -0600, Ken Springer
wrote:

So when Serif offered me 75% discount on X6, current version
is X7, I bought 2 copies and gave her one. She is so happy with it,


Are you a WordPerfect fan? Welcome to the club!

I used to be. :-) But my employer at the time switched to Office, and
no one liked the decision. I know why it was done, it made sense, but
would be off topic here. If you want to know the details, send me an email.

I still have my copy of WP for the Atari, a copy of Novell's version,
but I don't know as I write this if it's a Windows or Mac version.

I wish Corel made a Mac version, I'd like to take a look at Paradox. It
would be nice if they sold the WP Office components separately, but they
don't. And I haven't found a copy for sale cheap enough to tempt me.



but
is POed she has to move to Publisher.



Why does she have to do that? I've done desktop publishing on
WordPerfect and it worked very well for it.

Company policy, a.k.a. approved software. I've been trying to get her
to at least ask for "special dispensation" to let her continue to use
Page Plus, she really likes it, but I haven't won the argument as of yet.


--
Ken
Mac OS X 10.8.5
Firefox 25.0
Thunderbird 24.6.0
"My brain is like lightning, a quick flash
and it's gone!"

I have to attribute some of her use of
Open Office to be a spin-off of people thinking MS Word is the be all
end all for everything. And in her case, getting her to try something
else is difficult at best. To get her away for Open Office, I drug her
to a local library course on MS Publisher. (Crappy course, BTW.) It
opened her eyes, and she started saying she needed a page layout
program.

Again, I don’t know her exact job functions, and pretty much, assumed
that she is not an occasional user, but if she were, using a word
processor or MS Publisher isn’t so bad.

It was a long time ago since my direct involvement in desktop
publishing, but at the time, I was also wondering for why technical
writers used desktop publishing software (PageMaker, at the time) when
(MS) Office was readily available for everyone, plus that I was pretty
good with MS Word for complex documents including using data source and
objects from other Office components. I was also the kind of person
thinking “MS Word is the be all end all for everything�.

But I did a comparison and test on the two types of software, and it
didn’t take long for me to notice the major difference between the two.
As you mentioned, the center piece of a desktop publishing software is
for the “page layout,� so text/writing/words (boxes and blocks) are
treated as an object/element like other visual elements, so they can be
manipulated and arranged along with other elements, and the focus is the
final visual effects of the outcome. For a word processor, and despite
its capabilities of using images and objects, the center piece still is
the writing and the purpose of using elements and objects is to
illustrate the writing.

In other words, it’s much easier for using publishing software for page
layout than using a word processor, though it’s achievable by using a
word processor. I know that many companies are using both, so people
like me can write contents using a word processor and then submit it to
art people or outside vendors for afterward page layout, publishing, or
production.

MS Publisher is part of MS Office and it’s for office workers (and
hobbyists) who need to do some occasional work for publishing or art.
It is similar to their FrontPage which in the early days did help many
non-professional web developers to develop web pages and put up their
websites (with messy proprietary codes), but nevertheless, it helps to
get jobs done. So it really depends on her primary job functions.

[...] So when Serif offered me 75% discount on X6, current version
is X7, I bought 2 copies and gave her one. She is so happy with it,
but is POed she has to move to Publisher.

I'm sure companies use Publisher because it comes with Office Pro and
other iterations of Office. I suspect companies have this policy
because TPTB and IT people know nothing about actually using the
software, and the amount of time that can be wasted using Office when
other software probably matches their needs better.

Can she ask the management (not IT people) to *approve* the software by
demonstrating the amount of time spent on doing the same tasks of using
the two software? And exactly like what you said, “[…]the amount of
time that can be wasted using Office when other software probably
matches their needs better.� so show them a simple formula: Time Saved =
Cost Saved = Productivity Increased = Profit Increased. Regardless of
the complexity of the formula, which can be very sophisticated or a
simple one to be easily understood, it works every time in my experience.

Good luck

Ken Springer wrote, On 6/24/2014 2:03 PM:


I've a friend that just learned that lesson. She kept fighting with
Open Office for some projects at work. Always complaining this or that
doesn't work. I bought her a copy of Serif's Page Plus, and she hasn't
touched Open Office since for work. But now she's got a company
computer, and is being told to use MS Publisher. And she hates
Publisher. LOL



http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/pu...in=HA104032122

--
...winston
msft mvp consumer apps