After moving over to my new laptop, I had to move over Thunderbird (the open-source email application created by Mozilla, the same group that created Firefox). I had a whole system in place to copy over my email, since I’ve reformatted or bought new hard drives for my computer in the past. For some reason, I just couldn’t get it up and running on Windows 7. After trying for an hour, including looking for instructions on how to do it, I eventually decided all the instructions were out-dated and didn’t work. I don’t know if this is because I’m using Windows 7, or if Mozilla changed something in the application itself.
So, I decided to just move everything over to gmail and access my accounts with gmail’s pop3 access. It was a much easier system to get up and running. Plus, I won’t have to worry about backing up my email, or figure out how to get the email up and running whenever I change computers or hard drives.
I’ve generally had a contentious relationship with open-source software, and it seems like this is one more example of the problems I’ve had with it. Admittedly, I still use Firefox, Open Office, and NSIS, although, now that I think about it, all of them were commercial applications they fell into open-source. I wonder if there’s a correlation there.