When I remarked to Brian that I was still holding on to a few non-Mac pieces of software, he warned me that once you start drinking the Mac Kool-Aid, you get hooked. And I have; Spotlight (desktop search) in particular is quite handy. It doesn’t index Thunderbird mail, though, and Thunderbird also has this obnoxious, year-old bug where the cursor is always out of place, making perfectionist editing a nightmare. So with those two pushes, I made the leap to Mac’s native Mail.app.
The transition wasn’t bad; rename Thunderbird mail files to .mbox and import. Of course, that would’ve been ten times easier to script if it weren’t for the spaces in the filenames (Unix sacrilidge!).
After accumulating five years of email (and I write a lot of email!) under Netscape/Mozilla/Thunderbird, it’s interesting to realize what can be left behind. A ton of evidence from various Internet dating forays, plans and reservations from past vacations, and all the miscellaneous messages that didn’t merit a folder. Perversely, I am brining my junk mail with me to train the filter, though it did a decent job with a blind start.
With Thunderbird also goes my RSS reader, which was functional except for adding and editing feed sources. On the recommendation of some people from work I’m trying RSS Owl, which meets my current ideals of being free, open source, and multi-platform. Shameless plug: this site also has a feed.
