[plug] Rejoice as you use your Linux!

[Craig Ringer]

> In the office here we have 25 odd machines. 23 of which the office "IT 
> expert" converted to Outlook from Eudora. The remaining 2 are still 
> running Eudora.

Hmm... Eudora is a bit of a POS too. Sure, it's fairly secure - but it 
has no privacy controls (remote image loading, etc) and its MIME 
handling is pretty damnn poor. All sorts of issues with boundaries. My 
favourite is it's "mbox" file format - sure, it looks like a standard 
MBOX file, but just try to use it as one! It's horrible, I had to write 
a perl script to (try to) fix it when converting users to Mozilla mail 
on our LTSP setup.

Also, Eudora with a network mail spool is a PITA. If it ever dies, it 
leaves a stale lock file. The user can opt to continue despite the lock 
file, but it won't then remove the lock file when it exits, so the stale 
  lock warning will appear at each launch until the admin manually 
removes it. *sigh*. You can disable creation of the lock file, but then 
it'll destroy its own mail spools if the user has Eudora in the windows 
quick launch bar and double clicks on it (starting two copies).

I used to wish I could get Eudora running under WINE - now I'm glad I 
never did.

There are a few niggling bugs in Mozilla mail that've been around for a 
while, and if they are sorted out I'll be happily reccomending it to 
anybody - currently

> Despite what people say (including me) 2000 or XP do what they do 
> adequately enough that people familiar with them don't want to make the 
> switch to anything that might be harder or different.

Yeah, because the network admin takes care of the backups, crash 
handling, registry corruption, weird crash problems, configuration and 
virus protection without the user having to worry about it. So of course 
  it's easy to use....

> I tried to get OpenOffice in here, but because it would not open the 
> last 10 years worth of Word documents absolutley flawlessly, it was 
> rejected out of hand. Ignorance is bliss.

I'm about to offer up a tarball of about a gig of word documents for the 
perusal of the OO.o team, since they're excellent examples of "of course 
MS word is a desktop publishing program," and contain about every weird 
use of Word and its file format that's ever been seen.

Maybe a few good samples will help improve compatability.

Craig Ringer