Thunderbird, habits, and IMAP

The Mozilla Project released Thunderbird 1.0 today, and to celebrate I decided to FINALLY make my vmunix.com email available via IMAP. I’ve had an IMAP/POP server running for years, but old habits are hard to break.. I’ve been filtering my email with procmail, delivering to mboxes, and reading it with mutt for so long that I put up with the annoyances of the setup for years. Now that I’m regularly sending email with photos of Charlie out to friends and relatives, the cumbersome two step process of uploading the images to the server and then composing the message was getting annoying. So I changed my procmail rules to deliver to Maildir so courier-imap can read my Inbox, and changed mutt to simply load ~/Maildir/ directly. It’s the best of both worlds, really.

So yeah, I’m using Thunderbird to read those IMAP folders. It’s a pretty good email program. I’ve been using it on Windows and Linux since 0.8, and have no qualms recommending it. The spam filter is good, as is the IMAP support. I’m still using Apple’s Mail.app on my Powerbook, however, largely because it’s so damned handy to just press “Email” in iPhoto to send out Charlie photos. Apple’s IMAP code is solid too.

So there we go. I feel like I’ve updated my email workflow to the 21st century. Hoorah!