This is a Return Receipt for the mail that you sent to xxxx.

Note: This Return Receipt only acknowledges that the message was displayed on the recipient’s computer. There is no guarantee that the recipient has read or understood the message contents.

Oh. Even mail delivery systems (which usually send out highly technical and complicated messages) start expressing themselves like lawyers.

But if they specify this, maybe that means it’s a functionality they’re working on, and pretty soon you’ll be informed immediately when someone you wrote to hasn’t properly understood your message. That will be helpful. It will drown our mailboxes with warning notices, but it’ll sure be helpful. Or maybe it should just be an elementary auto-reply system embedded only in Outlook.

I just read an article praising Opera’s mail client, so I thought I’d try to import my (many, many) archived messages from Eudora and see how it works (even though Opera 7.5 is a beta version, which I’m not going to trust with my everyday mail management). And it isn’t starting well.

I’ve been using Eudora for a while. My hardware setup has changed a lot over that time, particularly when it comes to hard drives. In short, many attachments have been saved on D:, which is now a CDROM; for each message dating back from then, Opera sends a “There is no disk in the drive. Insert a disc in drive D:. Cancel / Retry / Continue.” Each message. Thousands of messages. Well, okay, it’s a system error message, so it’s as much Windows’ fault as Opera’s. But still. What are the chances I’d still have on my hard disk attached files from several years ago?

All I have to do now is put a random CD in the drive.

P.S. Am I dreaming or Google’s revolutionary mail concept, that puts everything in a big bag and allows you to search through it, is just copied from Opera?

I think I like it. Might try and use it.

P.S. Would be better if it had really imported all my messages. It looks like it got mail from an old Eudora (I don’t know where it found it). Considering it doesn’t ask where to get the mailboxes, I don’t know how to solve this. But I can’t start using a mail client without my 2003-2004 archives.

P.S. All messages have been imported alright, they’re saved in the store directory, but Opera doesn’t display them (and, yes, I did check all the right view options). I guess I’ll have to wait for the stable release. Can’t wait to try and use this mail client, it seems to be made for me.

In the meantime I could use GMail, since it works the same way, but I just don’t want to trust an external server with my personal mail.

P.S. Didn’t want to wait, so I installed Opera 7.23. And I’ve got exactly the same problem: it imports 32,000 messages but only displays 8,000 of them in Received. Annoying.

The RSS aggregator in Opera 7.50 (beta) is rather nice and pretty simple to use (too bad there are a few bugs and, more importantly, it doesn’t have categories); the browser around it is sweet. Besides, Opera now uses Google’s Adwords, which occupy less state real estate than previously. I’m not going to switch, but it’s good.

Oh, and I’m testing again Thunderbird, too. Last time was 0.4, now it’s 0.6 and seems less bloated. We’ll see. I’d love to give up Eudora. Maybe I should also look into Opera’s mail client, I never really tried it out.

P.S. Ok, forget about Thunderbird. (Again.) Not even considering the fact that it doesn’t seem to check my mail every 10 minutes as I asked it to, I just don’t understand how people can handle a pane-based mail client, à la Outlook. When I get mail, Eudora opens the windows of all folders where there’s new mail; Thunderbird (or Outlook, or Opera, etc.) only displays folder names in bold — and it looks like it doesn’t emphasize the relevant accounts, which is particularly annoying as I have a dozen accounts and I can’t leave them all open or it’s unreadable.

In short, these things are just plain unusable. I only regularly check three accounts, and I only have half a dozen filters, but I still need a multi-window client. Too bad.

As for Opera, it doesn’t seem to update RSS feeds at all. I guess it’ll be solved by the time a stable 7.5 is released, but in the meantime…

I had a look at the code (the advantage of webmastering many different blogs is getting a hand at many different CMSs) before I posted a comment there and, yes, it’s just as I thought: if I’m not mistaken (I didn’t go through every included file), WordPress and DotClear do send a SQL query every time an aggregator requests the RSS. Which means, once or twice per hour and per regular reader. It kills me.

“Yeah, but it’s open source, so it has to be better than Movable Type, it’s just statutory.” Right. But wrong. When I install Movable Type I don’t have to think about how I’ll hack the administration pages to make them generate static pages when content has changed.

Meanwhile, I’m sweating blood over reprogramming Gayattitude to spare the SQL server and make as much of it into static pages as I can (even if that means losing those visitors who can’t use cookies). One of these days I’m just gonna migrate all the blogs on this server to Movable Type.

P.S. Before people call me a freerider and tell me I should just shut up and either contribute or not use it: I’m not criticizing the fact that a free, open source piece of software, which I use, is incomplete. I’m criticizaing, as a (genial, of course) programmer, the fact that (non-genial, obviously) colleagues could upload blog systems that, each time a reader access the RSS URL, trigger a host of includes and a big SQL query, even though its contents only change a few times a day at most, when the blogger posts (I’ll be more lenient about the home page, as it changes much more frequently if comments are activated, and it can also need to contain PHP for other uses). It kills me, not as a software user, but as an engineer.