Brett Russ wrote:
Stephen C. Daukas wrote:
Q1 - OpenOffice versus MS Office:
What you're going to find is that OO is quite compatible with a few exceptions.
[snip] This is what I hear. In fact, my father-in-law likes to tell of trying to read an older MS Office file using a newer version of MS Office without success, but was able to read it in OO... I hadn't thought about saving MS presentations as rtf, for example... Something to play with I suppose. [snip]
I'd also like to drop the static IP because of cost, and have already moved the web site to a commercial provider...
No need for static IP with all of the dynamic DNS providers out there. Check out http://www.dyndns.org/ right here in Worcester. Then use the ddclient daemon (or similar) to keep it up to date.
Thanks! I hadn't heard about dyndns...$25 per year is a lot less than paying for a static IP!!
Q3 - Email:
This is the easiest one yet! Mozilla stores mail in the mbox format, [snip] You don't need the <folder>.msf files, those are only Mozilla internal tracking stuff.
I'd recommend the latest Thunderbird as a mail user agent (MUA). They've got Win and Lin releases.
Yes, I noticed the file structure but wasn't sure about attachments and how they are treated in Mozilla. Looks like they are just in-line to me.
Beyond that specific issue, what would be the best way to handle email? Right now I limit myself to using one platform and POP only from it. This is because I can travel with the laptop and not all the servers I access allow IMAP. I retrieve mail from 7 different accounts and forwarding is not allowed (nor do I want to have to keep track of that). I don't mind having to do this, but I'm wondering about other options...
Well, if I had the time and motivation, what I want to do is suck all mail onto my home server and export it via IMAP over SSL so I can access it from anywhere and only have 1 copy to worry about. Charter (my ISP) used to allow IMAP to it's mail server, but recently that was turned off and I'm back to POP hell where I have to delete messages multiple times since multiple machines are checking mail all the time. IMAP is superior, if you can use it or provide it to yourself then go that route.
This is exactly where I ended up when I decided that I do not want to have to set-up and run my own services. What about pointing the agent at a file structure that lives on another machine, can that be done with Thunderbird? If so, then all the POPing can be done on one machine... Then again, I have been leaving the messages on the various servers under POP3 except for the one machine at home where the email is actually removed from the server after download. This can be problematic with size limits on some of the mail servers though... Steve