Internet Software

You may have read earlier that I had written a funky script to remove email that I’d never ever read from my inbox, and it had all gone horribly wrong when I passed a null string into the function and it deleted the whole inbox along with 700+ messages in it. Disaster to some extent!

Then I sat and had a think about how long it would take to import all 700+ headers every time Thunderbird wanted to read my inbox. That wouldn’t be efficient – surely Thunderbird does some caching?

Lo and behold it does, and I’ve recovered everything (and a little bit more besides!) – let me explain.

Bratz movie Recovering Deleted Mail – Thunderbird!

• As soon as I got back to my machine with Thunderbird on, I turned off the Internet, unplugged cables and routers. The machine was no completely independent (it hasn’t been this way in a long time!).
• I located the Thunderbird data files.
  (in my case: c:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\<profile name>)
• Under this directory I located where IMAP does it’s caching (ImapMail\<imap servername>).
• I copied the INBOX and the INBOX.msf to a directory under Mail\Local Folders (in the Profile directory).
• I loaded Thunderbird, and there in my local folders was all my old mail (minus attachments I suspect!)
• I plugged in the Internet again and let the IMAP account download any new mail since I’d made my screw up.
• Then dragged and dropped all the messages to the IMAP folder!

Only one slight concern is it’s still going and says there’s 16,000 emails in there. Looking at what’s being uploaded there are a fair amount of duplicates and also the deleted mail is still in there (so it’s probably because I haven’t compacted that folder in some time!

R’coon Dawg release

The duplicates are easy to dispose of via the Remove Duplicates Add-on for Thunderbird. Deletions I’ll just have to delete again Maybe that script can help!

The Prisoner video I hope this helps somebody in a blind panic one day!

A word to the wise, always make backups….. Particularly when you are testing a script that has the ability to delete emails!!!!!!!

I was writing a script to delete some of my emails whilst I’m away, regular newsletters, advertising from holiday companies, you know the sort of stuff I’m talking about? Not spam, and not stuff I want to unsubscribe from – just stuff – stuff that I’ll only delete when I get home anyway.

Anyway, I screwed it up and an empty variable got passed into the cleanup script and has blown away my entire inbox. Luckily it’s my more spammy account that I signup to most things with, however I’m quite good at pruning it normally and it had over 700 posts in! GRR!

So a lesson, backup files and mailboxes before you run ANY automated scripts against them!
photo credit: alvy

OK, I resisted it a little bit, but I finally went and downloaded Google Chrome….

Interesting that it’s only available for Windows first and not Mac, but Google must figure that market is already sewn up by Safari on the Mac (mind you the way Apple keep offering me Safari with iTunes it must be on half of Windows users machines by now – anyone know how I stop that?!).

475kB download??? I assumed it was quick because I’m on the corporate network and it’s probably in the cache but that will be quick on almost any connection – I’m suspecting it downloads more stuff as it installs?

Installation is a couple of clicks and it’s away…

Interestingly at work my default browser is IE (for corporate sites it’s easier), so it immediately imports from there rather than Firefox. I suspect at home that will be a different case. Actually it’s quite a relief as I’d already got 10 tabs open and suspected I might have to close them all down like Chris.

It seems to have imported all my IE stuff quite well, including all the proxy settings for the corporate firewall, interestingly when I go to “Under the Hood -> Change Proxy Settings” it appears to be using the OS proxy settings as they’re configured in LAN settings.
That said this almost the only thing worth playing with in the Options, very limited at the moment in there.

Things I liked within two minutes of playing….

• Task Manager for tabs…
  Oh the joy of an out of control plugin crashing Firefox and all your open tabs as it chews up 400MB of memory… This should stop all of that, mind you as a colleague pointed out, is this just a front runner to a Google OS that’s integrated with Chrome?
• Incognito Mode:
  

  You’ve gone incognito. Pages that you view in this window won’t appear in your browser history or search history, and they won’t leave other traces, like cookies, on your computer after you close the incognito window. Any files that you download or bookmarks that you create will be preserved, however.

  Definitely good for internet cafe’s and shared machines.

• Flash etcWorking straight out of the box by the looks of it… Now that is nice.

Things I’m not sure about:

• That status bar thing, I like my status bar, it helps me identify phishing sites etc. But the Chrome version only pops up when I float over a link.
• The lack of status bar brings me to another thing, in my Firefox status bar I have my adsense earnings… Plugins, or lack of them – I can’t see any real way to extend Chrome, this is still beta so that may come I guess.
• RSS feeds in the URL bar, I’m used to seeing that appear for any sites that have a feed. For my own site I’m fortunate enough to have an RSS button on the actual page, but I tried to subscribe to John Lilly’s blog in Google Reader and it wasn’t obvious… I confess – I copied the link to Friefox!

The guys at Mozilla don’t seem too bothered saying they welcome the competition a new browser in the market will create. The interesting part as so many Google developers have contributed to the Mozilla project, will be to see how many plugins end up built into Chrome, and whether a plugin interface appears later in the release cycle. I agree with Mozilla CEO John Lilly at the moment:

I personally think Firefox 3 is an incredibly great browser – the best anywhere

Read more about Mozilla’s thoughts on John’s own blog.

UPDATE: You’ll have read in the comments the concerns of Andrew and many others about the terms of service that Google have included. Matt Cutts has updated us on this being changed.

Notes on a Scandal release

I design sites (not well most of the time!) and often pinch bits and bobs from the various CSS stylesheets I’ve created over the years, generally I normally end up coming up with something that looks at least half decent!

However, all that cutting and pasting leaves my stylesheets in a mess – with tonnes of unused CSS styles!

I spotted a reference to Dust-Me Selectors today on San Baldo, and using this fantastic Firefox Extension I have managed, in the space of minutes to reduce on stylesheet from an unmanageable 600 lines to a mere 200!

It extracts all the selectors from all the stylesheets on the page you’re viewing, then analyzes that page to see which of those selectors are not used. The data is then stored in your user preferences, so that as you continue to navigate around a site, selectors will be crossed off the list as they’re encountered.

You’ll end up with a profile of which selectors are not used anywhere on the site.

If you found this post useful, why not buy me a coffee or a beer (depending on the time of day obviously!):

If you really want to learn about CSS you need to be reading some of the following books:

How many IM clients does one guy need on his laptop? Let’s get this straight, I can only chat to so many people at once, now why can’t they all use the same client?

I have MSN, it’s kind of the de facto standard that most people seem to have these days (probably because it comes bundled with Windows?), I’ve also got Yahoo installed (for the Anti-Microsoft brigade).

What about the rest?

• I tried MySpaceIM (the people I actually want to chat to are mostly on MSN anyway so I never login).
• Skype, Yep I’ve got that installed too – but more for SkypeIn number being tied to the business, so that has to be on my machine.
• ICQ, I binned years ago – although I suspect it’s still running in one form or another!?
• AIM, I did have installed up until I changed laptop’s – never reinstalled it.

See, all of the above and still people text and email me!

So on Matt’s suggestion this morning I went digging for info on Pidgin (formerly GAIM), it certainly sounds like it should do the job so I’ve downloaded it (whilst chatting to Matt on his version of it!).

It’s not light at 10.9MB (28.1MB standard install) but I guess it may take some of the other stuff off my machine, I doubt it supports video for MSN, but we’ll see!

Installation Update: It’s uninstalled my GTK+ 2 runtime library, which I’m a “little” concerned about.

Running Update: It won’t connect to Google Talk and I’m not letting it try to connect to MSN whilst I’m chatting to people – so I’ll keep you posted on progress in the coming days.

Looks like Twitter will be one of the first services to cross from Web2.0 onto mobile phones as well.

When you send Twitter a mobile text (SMS), it gets sent out to your group of friends and also saves to your Twitter page. Your friends might not have phone alerts turned on so they might check your web page instead. Likewise, you receive your friends mobile updates on your phone.

Twitter is a free service. At some point they may introduce optional, for-pay features or services but basic usage will remain free. Note: with phone alerts turned on.

Whilst I agree it sounds like a great application I can see it being bloody annoying, a sentiment echoed over at The Waving Cat!I think I’ll give it a miss for now!

Let me set the record straight for all those that have been querying me on the subject. I love Mozilla Firefox! I binned IE long ago and won’t even install IE7 currently! But I’m having some problems with the Mozilla alternative to Outlook, Thunderbird.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m using Thunderbird daily, in all fairness I’m using it in IMAP mode only and still downloading everything to my damned huge PST file in Outlook on another machine for archive purposes. But what are the alternatives?

I could go the whole hog and use Thunderbird for everything, and I do love some of it’s features – but detest others!! Maybe it’s the fact I’m running it in IMAP mode and haven’t gone the whole hog and used it?

I’ve spent many weeks looking at different clients and the options ahead of me, and still have yet to firm up my mind completely! The two biggest problems being that I
a) Access my mail from multiple machines
b) Would ideally like it to sync with my PDA (that all but ties me to a MS solution so I might have to give up on that one!).

ZDNet provides a decent review of some 9 email clients, but this ultimately boils down to two options in my opinon – Outlook or Thunderbird and I was well aware of that!

If you’re just on anti MS bashing session the KMFMS website goes into the realms of describing an anti-Microsoft product for almost every Microsoft product on the market!

Evolution for Windows, seems to have sadly fallen to the wayside on the sourceforge. – more’s the pity!

There’s quite a good quick start guide for Firefox and Thunderbird on the Open for Business site, mostly what I already knew, but will come in handy for those considering the move!

The Lightning Extension for Thunderbird appears to drag it up closer to Outlook functionality. But probably not all the way I suspect.

The Slush God seems to see it exactly my way… If I could find a good scheduling client that I could use alongside Thunderbird that would sync I might just have cracked it!! Slush God if you find anything let me know!

And finally, someone seems to have cracked this requirement designing FinchSync which I obviously need to look at further!!! It seems to have mixed reviews with Lifehacker & Marcus P. Zillman picking up on it.