Well, looks like we may be switching away from QuickMail Pro at work. I can’t say I’m all broken up about it, although I really have very few complaints about QuickMail; it simply failed to keep pace with the rest of the world. I had high hopes when Outspring bought it, but the past year has given me progressively fewer reasons to hope. I don’t think the Outspring guys had any idea what they were getting themselves into.
We evaluated a lot of email programs, but our requirement of being cross-platform limited the field dramatically. That basically left us with the Outlook/Entourage combo, webmail, something home-grown, or Thunderbird.
1) Outlook/Entourage combo
Entourage is a nice email program on OS X. I don’t particularly care for the changed in the 2004 version, but many people seem to like them. However, Outlook on Windows is a freakin’ virus magnet. Nobody in his or her right mind can deny that. And unless you’re going to run Exchange Server, you don’t get the full benefit. And running Exchange takes a lot more time than I spend managing Communigate Pro. Plus Entourage isn’t a full peer with Outlook, so this choice would marginalize our Mac users, of which I am one. And it’s expensive when you break it down per user.
2) Webmail
Clunky, slow, ugly. On the other hand, amazingly portable. Nothing to install on the local machine. That’s a plus. Of course, they’ll ask us to install it anyway, just like they ask to “install” PowerSchool or Yahoo Calendars. But in the end, most webmail interfaces suck absolutely.
3) Something home-grown.
I gave this serious thought, but reason won out. I may be dumb enough to write a student information system from scratch, but not to write an email client. Especially not the same year I write my own SIS. Yeesh.
4) Thunderbird.
Cross-platform. Nice interface. Integrated RSS reader; that’s a nice bonus. Junk mail filtering… good. LDAP support. Oooooh… auto-complete from LDAP server. Nice. Free. We have a winner.
The excellent LDAP support is the kicker for me. The magic bullet that’s kept QuickMail Pro alive for all these years has been its admittedly innovative address book management. Send each user a copy of the address book as an attachment, and everyone’s local machine is updated. Very nice. It’s a feature our users have come to use almost as a crutch: “I don’t have any address books, so I can’t send any mail.” Apparently they’ve failed, en masse, to crack the secret firstname underscore lastname at etown dot k12 dot pa dor us code. Oy. But since Thunderbird auto-completes recipient addresses directly from the LDAP server, there’s no longer a need to send out address book updates.
That leaves the problem of migrating email archives. I personally have over 20,000 messages archived QuickMail Pro. I’m not willing to start fresh and leave them behind, nor would I ask that of any user. But Thunderbird will only import from Eudora and Netscape Mail. Good luck getting QuickMail data into either of those formats. EmailChemy to the rescue! This nifty Java app converts basically any email format to basically any other. It converted my 20,000+ messages from QuickMail Pro format to Thunderbird format in about 15 minutes. Not bad at all, really.
So I’m on Thunderbird now. I’ll let you know how I make out.
Today I turn 32 years old.
Grace had her first visit to the allergist the other day. We were able to see to test results almost immediately, so we know now that Grace is allergic to cats (as am I; this we suspected already) and mold (this was a surprise, but not a shock). She also has mild asthma. So she’s now on an 
About twenty minutes later, the nurse returned and said it looked she was allergic to cats and mold. But they needed to run a second test to be sure, so they gave her a few more injections on the other arm. A few tears trickled down Grace’s cheek, she didn’t make any noise, even though the nurse and Jen and I all told her it was OK to cry if it hurt (like the kid in the next room who wouldn’t quit wailing). But Grace was absolutely stoic (a description that’s been used for me recently under very different circumstances).
3) We’re redoing Gracie’s bedroom for Christmas. It’s very pink. The tinted primer had it looking like Pepto-Bismol, but now that the first coat of real paint’s on, it looks more like bubble gum. But before we could do that, I had to sand off the pictures that Jen had painted (grass, bumblebees, butterflies, bunnies, the sun, and the moon) to cover up some of the drips and mistakes from the 2001 paint job. The majority of the walls was painted sky blue, and after sanding, I was scooping blue stuff out of my ears, wiping it out of my eyes, and coughing it up. It was nasty stuff. But the painting’s now all but done. We have some trim work to do yet, and a ceiling fan to install, but that’s about it.