With the recent buzz around the ‘net about gmail adding IMAP, I was anxious to finally give it a go. I’ve read a bit about IMAP, but had never had the opportunity to try it out. My work requires almost constant monitoring of email, and since I employ Google Apps for your domain to manage my email account, and prefer to use Apple’s Mail, I’d all but stopped using my old, but reliable clamshell ibook. Thus the excitement of being able to monitor my email from my laptop, the Nokia e62, and the desktop computer.
After seeing post at Lifehacker about Thunderbird, I figured it would be worth checking out. I knew that Thunderbird had reecently been updated; I hadn’t tested it in over a year. Being a quasi Mac fanboy, after following the instructions for using TB with the gmail IMAP, I sought a more “Apple” type theme. The only two I found, were outdated, with a max verson of 1.6. A couple of failed attempts to change the version number, I went hunting the intarweb for another version. (I also was having problems connecting to addons.mozilla.org, lots of times outs. Not sure if it’s a latency issue, or what.) (update)seems to be resolved, not sure what the problem was
After a few failed links, I found one that works. Twister MC had a beta version that worked just fine. It’s not an exact replica of Apple Mail, but certainly a better feel (not that the default TB theme is as bad as the default FF theme). I’m still not sold on TB, as it doesn’t integrate with Address Book, and I haven’t found a good solution for importing mine into TB, but I certainly like it better on this older Mac than the Panther Mail. I’ll continue to use TB on the ibook, keeping my eye out for extensions and improvements. As soon as I can afford Leopard, I’m sure all bets will be off though on the desktop, as I’m anxious to give that a whirl. Any TB extensions I should look for? I read another post @ Lifehacker, but none of the ones mentioned got my fancy.
update: This MR Tech will allow you to override the max version check and install either of the more common Apple Mail-like themes.
Yesterday over at Hawk Wings they posted an entry on how to roll your own custom Mail.app icon, with a link to a .psd template. I personally don’t use Mail.app, rather I’ve been running the nightly build of Thunderbird 3 for quite some time. The nightly is actually called Shredder and is, quite possibly, the worst icon in the world, so when I saw the Hawk Wings post, I jumped at the chance to customize my icon.
