The New York Times has a story about the explosive growth of Firefox, and how Redmond's screwed, at least in the short term. There may be only one way out, as Scott Ott amusingly points out.

But another article says that Thunderbird, its email client companion, won't be able to make as many inroads against Outlook, no matter how insecurity-ridden that program is, because of the energy barrier necessary to change email clients.

Email and Usenet are the biggest things keeping me from switching to Linux for my desktop--I just have too much legacy data in Eudora and Agent, and no obvious way to transition over to things like Thunderbird and Pan. I use Mozilla for browsing, but I'm still using Eudora and Agent, until there's an open-source solution for this problem.

What the Thunderbird people need to do is find a way of being able to extract your mail from your existing client--Outlook Express can already do this for several alternate clients.

There's a guy named Steve Cochran who's written a program that can extract mail from an Outlook Express message store into plaintext files, so it's obviously not an insoluble problem!

Migrating from Eudora isn't difficult. I stopped using eudora a while ago. When I left, all the "mailbox" files were plain text files that could be read other clients/text editors. Soon after the move I realized that I didn't really care about year old email that much anyway.

Getting the email addresses, is more important. I think they were stored in a text format as well. Not hard to import them.

I'm not familiar with the Linux usenet clients. I'm sure that it would be annoying to switch, no matter how good the new client is.

Using Linux does involve transaction costs (switching cost). It would also gain you somethings, and would make some other things difficult or perhaps not possible (certain games, certain hardware etc, etc). In the long run, I think you will find that accessing your legacy data very much easier when you use Linux/Unix/MacOS than any dos/windows variant.

Much like Detriot tried to build in obsolencens into its cars, Microsoft has done the same to its data formats, software, programming languages and operating systems. So if you want to read your MS word file from 5 years ago (2 versions or so) you had better hope that you've got MSword-this-version or you wont' be able to read it, even then support is buggy. That's just not acceptable.

Contrast that with text files/HTML files/Perl scripts/text emails/gifs/jpgs/postscript files/etc from 1991 that all are readable and most are still working.

Outlook is more of an email operating system than an email client. It has an API with freely available documentation that makes it easy not only to import and export data, but also to tap into events and extract/insert/alter data on the fly.

This is why the Outlook is bloated. It's a big part of why Outlook is insecure as all hell. It's also why writing a program to convert Outlook mail, contacts and calendar data to another format is the programming equivalent of paint-by-numbers.

Quote: "Outlook is more of an email operating system than an email client. It has an API with freely available documentation that makes it easy not only to import and export data."

Welllll Outlook on its own doesn't really import so well directly from other mail clients. Outlook Express on the other hand will happily import data from other mail clients. Then when you install and configure Outlook it says, "Hey I see you've been using Outlook Express, do you want to import your settings and data now? Yes or No."

I think what will hinder adoption of Thunderbird, especially in a business environment is Outlook's Calendaring and Contact management, more than e-mail. I would use Tbird, but I'd need to have Outlook open anyway to receive Meeting Invites, etc.

Fred
"Contrast that with text files/HTML files/Perl scripts/text emails/gifs/jpgs/postscript files/etc from 1991 that all are readable and most are still working."

No kidding. I worked at PCB Design bureau once. The tools for moving a 'job' along (design - production - customer - archive) were written in Perl, sometime in 1991-92. Seems when the bureau first launched, they tasked the senior PCB designer with making the process work. He sat down for a month, wrote the scripts and .. that was that. Save for maintennance, upgrades and tweaks that part of the job 'just worked'.

The only heartache was getting the college trained PCB designers, who had only seen and used windows, to believe that everything could be done from the command line by invoking a set of script names. We had an effort going to 'port' the scripts into TK-TCL so those guys could still have pretty GUI options, when the company was bought/absorbed.

I migrated from Outlook Express to Thunderbird simply by archiving the mail in my OE folders the way I've done since I first started using e-mail: saving them as files on my hard drive.

T-bird imported everything else right out of OE.

Ironically, it's Internet Explorer I really haven't been able to do entirely without; Windows Update -- other than Critical Update Notification -- won't work without it.

"Welllll Outlook on its own doesn't really import so well directly from other mail clients. Outlook Express on the other hand will happily import data from other mail clients."
Agreed. I've imported from other programs into Outlook Express, and from there into Outlook.

Regarding transfering data to Thunderbird, my original point still stands: Writing a utility to export Outlook data is easy.

"So if you want to read your MS word file from 5 years ago (2 versions or so) you had better hope that you've got MSword-this-version or you wont' be able to read it, even then support is buggy."

I haven't had problems reading my Word 97 documents on newer versions. You can read Word 2000 and 2003 documents on Word 97, by adding the free import filter from the M$ site.

Please stop making me defend Office. It's very disturbing.

My main problem getting off of Eudora is that I have heavily annotated my mailing list traffic with Eudora's label feature. I've flagged important messages in whats an otherwise indistinguishable sea of mail, going back years.