’ve long been a fan of the Mozilla products, particularly FireFox (as a browser) and Thunderbird (for my email). They’ve served me well. Until recently.

I’ve been having problems with Thunderbird. Occasionally email accounts (I’ve got three) would drop out for a week or so. Like stray dogs, they would eventually wander home. But recently one of my important accounts has failed and stayed failed for several months. This meant I had to browser into the AT&T site to get mail – not too bad except when you have a newsletter due out and people are submitting to two different email accounts. Hopping back and forth across the two systems while trying to manage what has been used (with multiple versions) was crazy. Worst, one or two of the more important submissions went inexplicably into the spam folder (which I overlooked).

So the short of it was that I finished off the newsletter, complained about the lack of submissions (before print time) and then learned that most people had posted in. Once I located these missing pieces (in the main, trash and spam folders across two different systems) was I able to completely redo the sixteen-page newsletter (inserting the newer pieces in their correct locations). While the finished product looked good, it was a total pain in the ass to assemble (twice). And all because Blunderbird can’t find its brains.

That’s not the only one. On the Firefox browser, the Amazon links I use (accessed through the books link at the bottom of this posting) don’t show up. They show up fine in Chrome and everything else, but Firefox can’t display them. That, too, is a pain in the ass.

I’ve asked for support on both of these issues and have gotten a techno-list of things I can try. I don’t feel like spending my days debugging someone else’s code. That’s just lame.

So that’s where I am right now. My brother suggested that I move all my folders out, delete the mail account, and see if I can rebuild it from scratch. That actually sounds like a good idea.

Still, a hammer is a hammer. What good is a hammer if you need to dick with it?

>>>YOU CAN GO DOWN THIS LINK TO SEE THE FIREFOX FAILURE. OR TO BUY A BOOK. I PREFER THE LATTER<<<