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!

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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

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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

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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:

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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.

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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!

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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.

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I’m not upgraded yet, but often my Firefox memory roams upto 80-120MB!!! Ouch!

Thoughts anyone?

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0×800CCCC2 RAS_NOT_INSTALLED RAS/DUN not installed.
0×800CCCC3 RAS_PROCS_NOT_FOUND RAS/DUN process not found.
0×800CCCC4 RAS_ERROR RAS/DUN error returned.
0×800CCCC5 RAS_INVALID_CONNECTOID Connectoid damaged or missing.
0×800CCCC6 RAS_GET_DIAL_PARAMS Error getting dial settings.

0×800CCCA0 NNTP_RESPONSE_ERROR News server response error.
0×800CCCA1 NNTP_NEWGROUPS_FAILED Newsgroup access failed.
0×800CCCA2 NNTP_LIST_FAILED LIST command to server failed.
0×800CCCA3 NNTP_LISTGROUP_FAILED Unable to display list.
0×800CCCA4 NNTP_GROUP_FAILED Unable to open group.
0×800CCCA5 NNTP_GROUP_NOTFOUND Group not on server.
0×800CCCA6 NNTP_ARTICLE_FAILED Message not on server.
0×800CCCA7 NNTP_HEAD_FAILED Message header not found.
0×800CCCA8 NNTP_BODY_FAILED Message body not found.
0×800CCCA9 NNTP_POST_FAILED Unable to post to server.
0×800CCCAA NNTP_NEXT_FAILED Unable to open next message.
0×800CCCAB NNTP_DATE_FAILED Unable to display date.
0×800CCCAC NNTP_HEADERS_FAILED Unable to display headers.
0×800CCCAD NNTP_XHDR_FAILED Unable to display MIME headers.
0×800CCCAE NNTP_INVALID_USERPASS Invalid user or password.

0×800CCC60 SMTP_RESPONSE_ERROR Invalid response.
0×800CCC61 SMTP_UNKNOWN_RESPONSE_CODE Unknown error code.
0×800CCC62 SMTP_500_SYNTAX_ERROR Syntax error returned.
0×800CCC63 SMTP_501_PARAM_SYNTAX Parameter syntax incorrect.
0×800CCC64 SMTP_502_COMMAND_NOTIMPL Command not implemented.
0×800CCC65 SMTP_503_COMMAND_SEQ Improper command sequence.
0×800CCC66 SMTP_504_COMMAND_PARAM_NOTIMPL Command not implemented.
0×800CCC67 SMTP_421_NOT_AVAILABLE Command not available.
0×800CCC68 SMTP_450_MAILBOX_BUSY Mailbox is locked and busy.
0×800CCC69 SMTP_550_MAILBOX_NOT_FOUND Mailbox not found.
0×800CCC6A SMTP_451_ERROR_PROCESSING Error processing request.
0×800CCC6B SMTP_551_USER_NOT_LOCAL User mailbox is known, but mailbox not on this server.
0×800CCC6C SMTP_452_NO_SYS

0×800CCC40 WINSOCK_WSASYSNOTREADY Network subsystem is unusable.
0×800CCC41 WINSOCK_WSAVERNOTSUPPORTED Windows Sockets cannot support this application.
0×800CCC42 WINSOCK_WSAEPROCLIM
0×800CCC43 WINSOCK_WSAEFAULT Bad address.
0×800CCC44 WINSOCK_FAILED_WSASTARTUP Unable to load Windows Sockets.
0×800CCC45 WINSOCK_WSAEINPROGRESS Operation now in progress. This error appears if a Windows Sockets API is called while a blocking function is in progress.

0×800CCCD1 IMAP_LOGINFAILURE Login failed.
0×800CCCD2 IMAP_TAGGED_NO_RESPONSE Message tagged.
0×800CCCD3 IMAP_BAD_RESPONSE Invalid response to request.
0×800CCCD4 IMAP_SVR_SYNTAXERR Syntax error.
0×800CCCD5 IMAP_NOTIMAPSERVER Not an IMAP server.
0×800CCCD6 IMAP_BUFFER_OVERFLOW Buffer limit exceeded.
0×800CCCD7 IMAP_RECVR_ERROR Recovery error.
0×800CCCD8 IMAP_INCOMPLETE_LINE Incomplete data.
0×800CCCD9 IMAP_CONNECTION_REFUSED Connection not allowed.
0×800CCCDA IMAP_UNRECOGNIZED_RESP Unknown response.
0×800CCCDB IMAP_CHANGEDUID User ID has changed.
0×800CCCDC IMAP_UIDORDER User ID command failed.
0×800CCCDD IMAP_UNSOLICITED_BYE Unexpected disconnect.
0×800CCCDE IMAP_IMPROPER_SVRSTATE Invalid server state.
0×800CCCDF IMAP_AUTH_NOT_POSSIBLE Unable to authorize client.
0×800CCCE0 IMAP_OUT_OF_AUTH_METHODS No more authorization types.

Thanks to Girl Geekette for this – I really must get round to browsing her blog as it looks like some really useful stuff on there.

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