So I found the nifty gravatar extension for Thunderbird, and after making it work in 1.5.0.*, I was anxious to see how many of my contacts actually have a Globally Recognized Avatar. On first glance, I couldn’t find any. Well, so maybe not very many people have one?

So I went and wrote a little script that would go through my archived mails and address book, checking every sender’s gravatar. The result is shocking: Except for myself, there was only 1 (ONE!) other address, and that was the one for the Firefox newsletter (and yes, that has a firefox logo).

So while it’s a nice extension, it’s widely unused. So are X-Faces, so installing an extention for those is almost as useless. Too bad. I’m a visual person, and I would like seeing avatar icons with mail 🙂

Was IMAP angeht, bin ich ja immer skeptisch. Aber bei web.de scheint das gut zu klappen. Habe eben ein HOWTO geschrieben für Einrichten von web.de Accounts in Thunderbird (mit IMAP). Auch wenn es das sicher schon irgendwo geben wird…

Privat benutze ich übrigens dann doch weder IMAP noch web.de noch einen deutschen Thunderbird. Englischer Thunderbird und mein eigener POP3 Server. Ein sinniger IMAP-Server (mit maildirs) wäre allerdings mal ein Projekt.

No, that’s not a virus. And no, there’s nothing with a .dat attachment on my emails, even though Outlook Express wants you to believe it. It’s a digital signature. It looks like this:

Content-Type: application/pgp-signature

iD8DBQE/fSqo2FTH6fnzT0IRAv81AJ42L5GD3XrqN0Sv/

ksXaKvcOCuQhgCeOlgy9FaROdCRoGB3Qd6lunjKDvk=

=NHUe

-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

What it does is to confirm that this email is actually written by me, and noone tempered with it. It’s like putting my signature under a written letter, only more safe against tampering.

Why is this such a problem for some people? Outlook Express. This degenerate piece of shit software decides that “if I don’t know what it is, I’ll make it look funny, invent an extension for it, and oh, while I’m at it, I’ll also not show my user the plain-text parts that I *could* understand, but pretend it’s in a .txt file attachment. And on the default security settings, it removes them:

If you’re an Outlook Express user, this is pretty annoying. But trust me, the mails from Outlook Express users are painful, too – and not because of a fault in anyone’s mailtool but the sender’s. So if it’s okay for the OE users to send their non-standard borked emails, I don’t see why I should stop sending my perfectly standdard-compliant emails just because OE doesn’t want to handle them.

“But Enno”, you’ll say, “don’t you care about whether people can read what you write?”. Yes I do. But the people I really care about are tech-savvy, and they don’t use mailtools that are old and broken. The standard for MIME (RFC 2048) will be 7 years old next month, and standard for OpenPGP/MIME (RFC 2440) will be 6 years old by then. They were practically invented before Microsoft realized that the Internet was something that mattered to them. Plenty of time to implement them. And about time to shrug, shake your head and go on with life. OE is dead.

I was upgrading enigmail today, and after restarting Thunderbird, it gave me the message that “A previous install did not complete correctly. Finishing install”. I googled for a fix, then helped myself: Whenever the file C:\Program Files\Thunderbird\xpicleanup.dat exists, Thunderbird will give the message. I deleted it, and Thunderbird starts. Not sure if I broke something in the process, though. The newer enigmail version didn’t install, and any time I tried, it gave the error again. the final solution was to remove my chrome/ folder from c:\Documents and Settings\enno\Thunderbird, delete the xpicleanup.dat file, delete and reinstall Thunderbird, then reinstall all extensions. A hassle, but at least now I’ve got a clean and working mail client again.