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Which Organizations Have Standardized on Mozilla?
andy brunetto asks: " We are investigating email clients to deploy as our "standard" at the college where I work. I'm trying to find out who is using Mozilla for their email. When I say "who" I mean organizationally, as I realize 99% of us geeks already use it. What organizations out there are rolling out Mozilla as their standard web and/or email client, and why? Yes, we are considering using Thunderbird, once it is final. Thanks!" Hopefully this will make companies realize that the Internet isn't comprised of just IE users.
My organization is entirely devoted to using mozilla and mozilla based products.
And yes, I AM looking to expand our current one man workforce.
I am a filthy pirate.
Sun Microsystems is transitioning to use Netscape 7, which is close enough to Mozilla...
of our large R&D development community is using Netscape, mostly because these people are using mostly Solaris or some are using Red Hat (7.3/8/9).
The other half is ALL IE, Outlook, Exchange.
--------
Free your mind.
Sorry, but the real geeks use Mutt ... graphical email clients are for geek posers ;)
(Score:-1, Wrong)
I use KMail, it's quite a good mailer IMHO.
Really? Everyone I know uses pine, Eudora, or Mail.app - you should be careful about making assumptions based on your own personal circumstances before you try to extrapolate data for use at an organization.
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
We rolled out IE5.01 using the IEAK (Internet Explorer Administration Kit). It would be a great thing if one could customize Mozilla in straight-foward manner for corporate deployments.
Wearing pants should always be optional.
I don't have a GUI you insensitive clod!!!
Unless all your clients are running Win2k with the antitrust service pack, and have no permissions....you can't elminate Internet Exploder.
I've installed the Netscape versions of Mozilla on the systems I maintain, and urge people to use them. It seems to work.
All public workstations at Columbia University have Mozilla as their default browser.
Ideally yes, but 99% is a bit generous. I know quite a few it gurus that just use IE. I mean mozilla is the politically correct thing to do, but you know, IE is pretty familiar to most people. If we could see the logs at Slashdot, I'm sure that IE would have a commanding lead.
We chose Mozilla to go along with IE and Outlook. All the Netscape users are happy (we used to standardize on 4.77), all the Outlook users are saying "WTF is this dragon head on my desktop"
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
UC Davis uses Mozilla as its standard web browser, and they use Eudora as their standard mail client.
If you ask me, it is really stupid to require people who have Windows, and hence already have IE, to install Mozilla on their computers just so that they can get technical support from the help line. Ditto Eudora vs. Outlook Express. Why bother people and clutter up their computers?
In the corporate environments where I've been working, Microsoft servers, browsers and email remain the status quo.
As a web developer, I use Mozilla because it's stricter about standards, and pages that render well in Moz almost always look the same in IE, while the reverse isn't true. One coworker gives me a (humorous) hard time about my refusal to use Microsoft FrontPage or IE when our company is unquestionably "a Microsoft shop".
Seems like there's no businesses -- certainly not incorporated ones -- want to hire experts in free software like Linux, Apache, PostgreSQL and Mozilla when 2kServer, IIS, SQL Server and IE are what all the other big companies are using first. Mozilla's got an uphill battle, and it knows it.
Purdue used Netscape 7 as the standard browser and mail client on over 3000 lab machines.
I think IBM's license for Netscape has just run out so alot of people are switching to Mozilla, not sure if this is worldwide or just UK.
"Pushing little children, with their fully automatics, they like to push the weak around"
Hopefully this will make companies realize that the Internet isn't comprised of just IE users.
Moreover, I fail to see how tallying "We use Mozilla" would go very far in convincing anyone that Internet users aren't predominantly IE users, anymore than tallying "Who uses IE" responses on an MS-fanboy site would indicate IE's pre-eminence.
To build a convincing argument here you need scientifically conducted surveys, not optional queries aimed at users of a particular browser on a niche site with considerable user self-selection.
I just started using Mozilla Mail. Despite having RTFM, I still can't figure out how to make Mozilla mail default to plain text for everyone. It's the only thing that tarnishes this otherwise delightful mail program.
i've been trying to get my small company to switch to Mozilla mail, but not many have because it doesn't have Outlook's calendar and scheduling features.
On the other hand, nobody invites me to meetings any more!
Personally, while I prefer Mozilla and Mozilla Firebird as browsers, I wouldn't touch Mozilla as an e-mail client. When people have problems with Mozilla or Thunderbird, the two most frequent answers are: "completely uninstall and reinstall Mozilla/Thunderbird," and/or "completely remove your profile and make a new one." Umm, thanks, but no thanks. What's the point of using an e-mail client where you delete your e-mail archive/profile if there's a problem, especially if your e-mail archive dates back a while? And since Thunderbird isn't even in beta yet, and "risky" changes are supposed to be made in Mozilla 1.5 and 1.6, I would stay far away from using Mozilla as an e-mail client.
If you're looking for decent e-mail clients, I'd recommend Pegasus Mail or The Bat! for Windows machines, or KMail or Evolution for *nix machines. All four are specialized for e-mail and are damned good at what they do. Test them out to see which works better for you and your organization.
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." - Oscar Wilde
"Why does the font change half way down the page??"
Ugh.
I work with small businesses, anywhere from 5 to 100 users. I have 3 clients of 20, 25, and 45 users respectively all using mozilla mail. Hell, I even have the 45 person shop switched over (almost everyone) to the ALPHA thunderbird. I just don't need the hassle of outlook virus issues, the users who don't use IMAP can keep their POP mail on their /home directory n the server, the address book talks to LDAP. I use the latest SuSE mail server which integrates LDAP address books out of the box,as well as webmail.
I am switching to thunderbird because we have some corporate partners who have B2B websites that require IE5 or better, so I need to standardize on IE unfortunately. Thunderbird can invoke your default browser in windows, unlike Moz Mail.
Well, I love it, but not exactly in an enterprise setting.
Between that and Mozilla not being able to lie about what it is to IE-only sites, that company is Internet Explorer and Outlook Express.
Then there's the Mac OS 9 based print/pre-press company. Mozilla dropped support for OS 9, yet we can't make the switch to OS X because of Quark.
That company is also IE/Outlook Express.
I'd switch if I could, but I can't so I won't.
We used to use Netscape, but migrated to Mozilla at 1.2 and are currently at 1.31. The email client is GREAT, I prefer it to Outlook. Most users don't know anything else since we have always used a Mozilla-like client. One user complained after switching from Outlook (I think it was a case of being used to it, and not having enough compu-savvy to be comfortable with the switch) and that person uses Outlook to this day. Interestingly enough, he is the only one who ever gets hit with email viruses ;-) The Junk filter is nice, and we use a web based calendaring solution from http://brownbearsw.com and a Perl based message board (Yabb) for sharing notes on stuff.
This geek uses Gnome Evolution. I would think Evolution would make a lot more sense for an organiation than Mozilla's mail client. Most organizations are going to be predominantly addicted to Outlook.
"A man talking sense to himself is no madder than a man talking nonsense not to himself."
The Citadel, a military college, has always used Netscape. When I left about 9 months ago they were testing Mozilla more as a browser. Most of the Professors use Netscape mail. I would be surprised if they switched over but you never know.
The two are basically the same they just look a little different.
I'm a big fan. But I still use IE.
Old habits die hard!
Losers whine about doing their best
Winners go home and f*ck the prom queen!
"as I realize 99% of us geeks already use [Mozilla]."
Sorry kid, but where I come from, 99% of people use Outlook and/or Exchange. Exchange or not, Outlook 2000 and XP are very capable email clients, and the easy calendar/contact integration and Palm synchronization make them the real winners. (By the way, there is a patch for Outlook 2000 that disallows opening of any harmful attachments. This comes standard with Outlook XP. I switched from Eudora two years ago and I've never even been able to open a virus-laden attachment, let alone send one, as it asks for confirmation when a program tries to automatically send something.) I browse the web using Mozilla (I'm using it right now), but Outlook wins hands-down on email.
If you want to standardize, standardize on the server side, not the client. Most organizations I have worked at standardized on IMAP (whether they did so through Exchange or another IMAP server.) IMAP has the advantage of keeping everyone's email on the server so people can access it through the web, at multiple computers, etc. The disadvantage, of course, is disk space -- you're going to need at least 10MB per account, and preferably 25MB or more, which quickly adds up. Plus, you're going to need to find a reliable way to back that up, and tape drives are expensive.
My recommendation is to standardize on IMAP, set up some webmail, and have some HOWTOs for several email clients. This being a college, you're going to find that most everyone will be using Outlook Express. Include HOWTOs for Mozilla, OE, Outlook, and whatever you choose as your webmail solution (there will be people who use the webmail exclusively.) As long as you set the standard on the server side, I don't think it's necessary to set a standard client -- just a recommended one. If you want that to be Mozilla, so be it, but understand that not everyone is going to want to use it.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
The main reasons we're sticking with Mozilla and not going IE?
Platform availability. It's available on Windows, Linux & Irix.
Not MS
Spam filtering
Doesn't propogate virii
Low/No cost
Why are we going with Mozilla instead of Netscape?
Available on all above platforms.
Doesn't have the AOL marketing embedded in it.
Windows installations will be WinInstalled, so all plugins & customizations can be centralized.
Hope it helps.
I love Mozilla as a browser but wouldn't touch its email app with a 10-foot pole. Besides, is their a huge advantage to centralizing on only one email app? Other than having tech support only dealing with a single program, email is a bit different than the web - I'm unaware of any major problems with using any random IMAP client to read from any random IMAP server. If someone likes a particular program, and they know it well enough not to cause a load on your help desk, is there a real reason not to let them use it?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Komodo uses Mozilla-the-platform, not Mozilla-the-application-suite. The question is about the use of the email and web browser applications in Mozilla, not the cross-platform framework that Mozilla uses.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Everyone I know uses mutt, because Pine is a slow-ass memory hog.
We have about 350 employees and we are standardizing on Mozilla. Outlook and Internet Explorer are considered VERBOTEN here due to their inherent (and, in our opinion, insurmountable) security risks. You can read our statement regarding the issue on our website:
Why Not IE?
Thanks to our no IE/no Outlook policy we have avoided EVERY major MS email worm outbreak. That means no downtime from the outbreaks, which translates in hours or days of work time not lost. (Compare to MS itself, which seems to lose its email system due to a new worm for at least a couple of days yearly.)
Life is short: void the warranty.
You forgot to point out that Sun's current browser standard is Netscape 4.7 (at least internally, which I assume is what you're talking about.) It has been for years, though Netscape 6 and 7 are also available if you know where to look.
There are many, many internal applications at Sun that are written for Netscape 4.7 and don't work in NS6/NS7 (don't ask me how, but it's true. It boggles my mind, too.) So yes, Sun has 40,000 employees still using the broken, non-standards-compliant Netscape 4.7 as their primary browser, and they've been trying to "transition" away from it for over 2 years now.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
Well all be, there is a spell checker for Moz, http://spellchecker.mozdev.org/ I was unaware of that, thanks to mu_wtfo for poing that out to me.
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http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=69438&cid=6
Can you list some bugs please? I have used Mozilla as my sole email client for several years now and had no problems. This includes multiple incoming account using both POP and IMAP (had some problems with IMAP but they were servers not following the RFC's correctly and were fixed with a server patch once the vendor was notified), multiple SMTP accounts including one using SSL, multiple LDAP accounts, etc.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
hmmmmmmmmm... I dunno if the author is looking for a survey that will hold water statistically (Slashdot, impartial? HA!). Seems like they just want to hear stories of "how and why", stuff like that. y'know, just finding out what the rest of the family is doing ^_^
Standing at the very edge of my imagination, I peered into the inky void and realised -- I couldn't think up a new sig.
"Everybody generalizes from one example. At least, I do."
-Steven Brust
C'mon, I understand using it for web browsing, but email?
Most of the posts that I see in mailing-lists are written with Pine, gnus (emacs' mail thingy), Mutt, KMail or MS Outlook. Maybe there's some Mozilla too, but it's not near "99%", not by a extremely long shot.
Ob-"I use": I'm very happy with Mutt myself, and my friends use also Mutt or Pine. Maybe we're all oldschool guys :-)
Ob-"Kids these days": Kids these days! When I was your age, we didn't have email. We had to shout to each other from miles and miles of distance! Sore throats were quite usual, trust me :-)
My weblog in spanish
Where I work, people use what they want to use. Many browse with IE, some use netcape or Opera, others use Konqueror or Mozilla.
For E-mail, most use Eudora, some use Outlook, pine or Kmail.
None that I know of use their web browser for E-mail.
Why do most organizations think they need to standardize on products rather than protocols or document standards? OK, the "IT department" thinks they need to provide support, but in many cases you could loosen up a bit... Use widely adopted protocols. Avoid proprietary protocols and formats that lock you in with a specific product.
)9TSS
The Networking Services and Information Technologies (NSIT) folk at the University of Chicago distribute a connectivity package during orientation week that includes Mozilla. The package also includes stuff like Eudora, though. Also the public computers in the Reynolds Club are made by Sun, so there's no IE there.
You can see a picture here.
I'll take a few random crash bugs as apposed to the over 30 megs of "security" updates one has to download for IE paired with windows. So since crash bugs are such an issue, I'll assume companies should also not be using IE? Any Microsoft software whatsoever?
Here at Wake Forest, we have a program where all students receive IBM laptops through the university (it's included in tuition). These come preloaded with a lot of expensive commercial software that most students couldn't afford to purchase legally if they weren't going through the university. The interesting thing is that this gives the university a great deal of control over the initial setup of students' machines (including those who are non-CS majors). We can customize them all we want or delete Windows and put Linux on there but the vast majority of students are just using what comes on there.
Until now, the Windows machines were actually all set up to use Netscape 4.79 and its mail client and to hide IE and especially Outlook. This was done (I assume) for security reasons, especially considering that virtually all the virus email I've received from on-campus mailing lists, etc is from people who ignored the preconfigured setup and installed Outlook Express anyway.
This fall, they are moving to Mozilla 1.4 (I'm guessing that the reason is the similary to the old Netscape interface). They decided that Mozilla 1.4 was superior to the newer Netscapes and are deploying it over a year on about 5,500 installations.
Combined with another new pilot program to preinstall Linux dual-boot setups for CS students here (and give us bigger hard disks than other students), open source seems to be on the rise here.
I guess I am in the 1% of geeks who do not use Mozilla at all, then. I've used the 1.0 series, and while there are some nice features I have no compelling reason to switch.
I would hope that 99% of geeks were using a browser other than IE. But considering the existance of Opera, Konqueror, etc, this non-IE browser does not need to be a Mozilla-based browser.
Unfortunately, this statistic is probably not correct, and there are a lot of geeks using IE. But can they really call themselves geeks then?
#!/
No one is going to touch mozilla until all the crash bugs are closed. I've had a crash bug open since moz 1.1 and its still not resolved.
/)
/) in the mozilla URL bar. then click on the crapzilla.html file that is shown in the file list.
From the bug you mentioned:
Follow these instructions EXACTLY. Open up your version of mozilla (1.4 or nightlies)
Make sure you have the recommended version of java installed (1.4.1 is recommended by the mozilla 1.4 release notes, or any other version will do)
Start up the javascript console and the java console in that order.
make mozilla fill 1/3 of your screen with the javascript console taking up another 1/3 and the java console the last 1/3.
put the 3 files (crapzilla.html, crapzilla.java, crapzilla.class in your root drive (c:\ or
type c:\ (or
wait till the counter counts down to 1500 and you will see a alert box. press Cntrl-Q to exit mozilla, click on the javascript console and hit file->exit, then quickly switch to the java console and hit the close button.
mozilla should now crash with the talkback window.
Yes, I'm so sure that this particular bug is going to prevent millions of people from adopting Mozilla-based products.
Yeah, 99% of us geeks use Mozilla. My ass we all use Mozilla.
I seem to recall a particular slashdot poll which asked "The browser I use most often...".
Seems that only 55% of geeks use Mozilla. I bet the actual numbers are much less, and lots of people who use IE went for the CowboyNeal option or couldn't admit that they use IE.
Use pine/Eudora. And I think the new Linux computer lab (one and only on entire Uni) is using pine/Evolution. Sorry, but I'm not going to trust my mail to Thunderbird any time soon either. Firebird *cough*Phoenix*cough* is fine for displaying content - but my e-mail client is there to permanently *organize* content, and I want it stable, reasonably bugfree and upgradable.
At least the Mozilla project has figured out that might some of us are interested in some parts like Firebird, couldn't care less about Chatzilla and Moz Mail and whatever else they put in there. They're going from one big monolith to smaller apps that do their thing - sounds almost like the old Unix design profile, and I think that's a good thing...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
My next comment on the 50%, how many of them were Opera or Konqueror users spoofing as MSIE?
We are investigating email clients to deploy as our "standard" at the college where I work. I'm trying to find out who is using Mozilla for their email.
Do you know why IExploder and Outlurk have %95+ market share? It's not because Microsoft is a monopoly, or because they are better products, or because Bill Gates is a member of the Trilateral Commission or the Bilderbergers. It's because of the herd instinct. People want to use the same software that other people in their group use. Corporations use IE/Ol because other corporations do. Geeks use Linux because other geeks do. There are rare exceptions, but by and large human beings rival cattle in their ability to be molded by the opinion of their peers.
I get the impression from your question that you're seeking to follow the herd. If you were one of the rare exceptions then you wouldn't care what other companies are using, and just deploy Mozilla. But since you're asking, it seems to me that either you or someone above you needs the assurance that using Mozilla in an organization isn't new, innovative or radical.
You're not asking about problems others have uncovered while deploying Mozilla in an organization. That's not your concern at all. Instead you merely want to know who is using it. If you want to be a individual unswayed by the unthinking opinion of your peers, then just go deploy Mozilla. But if you just want to make sure your head isn't sticking above the level of the herd too far, then stick with the Microsoft products that all the other organizations are using.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Newer versions of kmail will just display the raw html with a link at the top of the message pane that says:
Note: This is an HTML message. For security reasons, only the raw HTML code is shown. If you trust the sender of this message then you can activate formatted HTML display for this message by clicking here.
"Here" of course being clickable. Its pure entertainment looking at some of the truly evil Outlook-exploiting shit in some of them. I can easily read mails sent to me from trusted users with clueless clients and still not pull images from spammer servers. Kmail Just Works.
just answer the question and stop criticizing the submitter (me!), picking apart what a "geek" is, or going on about my choice of words? I did not ask for a review of Mozilla, or what other email/web clients exist, or your opinion on standardizing on a product. BTW, we standardize so we can provide suppoprt to the 3000+ computers here.
No one is going to touch mozilla until all the crash bugs are closed.
Mozilla -> crash here and there
IE Exploder -> pop-up, pop-up, pop-up
Mozilla Email -> crash now and again
Outlook -> Mails to everyone in your address book of the latest Nicaragua money that was made by Penis enlargment pills.
The internal struggle of what to use continues for me!
-- Knowing too much can get you killed, but knowing who knows too much can make you rich.
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211436 #c8
proves you wrong.
Not to be a smart ass (well, sorta), but what about IE? IE is at least as "unstable" as you report Mozilla to be. In my case, I've found that IE crashes far more than Mozilla does, yet I use Mozilla more than IE. I don't think that this is a criteria that many will be using to judge browsers, as both are relatively stable.
:) and the lock-in you get with MS Exchange, but the huge drawback being the fact that it is so easily comprimised by viruses and worms and whatnot.
:(
Seriously though, how many open crash bugs are left? It seems that the one you point out is somewhat complicated to duplicate, involves Mozilla interacting with Java (something that seems to cause most browsers some consternation), and is not an issue for 99% of the web-browsing public.
Not that this has anything to do with Mozilla Mail in the least. A comparison between Outlook and Mozilla Mail or Thunderbird might be a little more on topic. It seems to me that all three are, like their browser counterparts, fairly stable, and offer a fair to decent email experience.
I find that a big draw for Outlook would be it's well designed UI (seriously, it's about the only thing it's good for!
Sadly most people seem to be insanely ignorant of this point, and just keep chugging along, happily flooding the internet with Klez, Bugbear, and Sobig.
I think that the great feature that could attract people to the Mozilla team's offerings is the built-in Bayesian spam filter! Much like pop-up blocking, and, to a lesser extent, tabbed browsing, this is the kind of feature you can mention to somebody, and they go "Oh, hey... that's pretty cool!" It's definitely something that people need, given how much spam is out there, but if people don't know about it, then they will content to wallow in mediocrity.
-Colin
I am the tech guy for a small manufacturing/distribution company. For a couple years I made sure that I told the owners about every major Outlok exploit and worm. I also made a point to explain how hard it is to comply with MS licensing (upgrading OEM versions on Beige boxes etc.). One day one of the owners received a strange, personal, confidential Word document from a close friend's mail worm. I immediately received the OK to convert the company to Mozilla. I then expanded that to include IMAP as the standard delivery protocol. For IMAP support I would heve preferred Mulberry but users seemed to adapt quicker to Mozilla (simpler interface and better inline image support). Now after a few months people have adapted and everyone seems quite happy with the switch. Backups are easier. Remote access is possible. I still think some miss Outlook because it's prettier to them and because the calendar in Outlook is so much better but I think the rest either don't care or prefer Mozilla. I do get strange looks when I tell new hires that we use Mozilla for mail though.
If you think the answer is zero, or that commercial software is any better you would be mistaken. The only difference between Mozilla and other software is you can read the bugs and therefore gauge the risk and even produce workarounds if necessary. With commercial software bug reports disappear into a black hole - they might be fixed or they might not but you'll never know until an update appears and you can try to replicate the problem.
I've recently standardized our company on Mozilla mail using IMAP access. I went through deploying Mozilla 1.3.1 and now 1.4 to about 50 users on various Windows machines. We previously were using Eudora and POP3 access.
Here are some of our motivating factors to switch to a Mozilla/IMAP solution include:
Overall, Mozilla's been accepted as "much better than Eudora", however I still get the occasional user which feels that the change only made things worse. And of course, there are those who long for the usability of Outlook. We kindly remind them that Outlook is evil and using Mozilla helps keep us worm free. Yes - we virus scan and sanitize (Anomy Sanitizer) our mail before delivery, but nothing's perfect.
Now for the gripes:
Our ultimate goal, as some have mentioned, is to embrace Thunderbird, since some users still want to use IE as their browser (mostly for site compatability reasons), and to have their email links launch in their browser of choice. That, and it not nearly as "bloated" as the entire Mozilla suite, especially since most of my users are only using the email component.
$ man woman *
-bash:
It could be the sign of a larger, unnoticed bug. Also, all those steps may not be necessary, it may just be one of many paths to the same bug.
I use Windows 2000 and RedHat 9 equally. IE never crashes, but Galeon does all the time. I can't count the number of times I've had to click "Restore last session". Of course, some of those might be Galeon itself, but most of them are Mozilla (which I'm informed of after submitting a bug report).
Here are the stats for the people that click on my sig link from slashdot.
46% Netscape Navigator 5
34% Internet Explorer 6
7% Internet Explorer 5
6% Opera 7
2% Konqueror 3
1% Opera 6
1% Safari
< 1% Netscape Navigator 4
< 1% Konqueror 2
< 1% Internet Explorer 4
< 1% Netscape Navigator 3
< 1% Opera 5
Best Windows Freeware
Things like pop up blocking are becoming something that more and more people want I think. If you were to magically substitute mozilla for IE in your office or whatever would people (really) notice? They do the same thing. Now turn on the pop up blocking and let them use use mozmail/thunderbird and suddenly it's "hey, where are my pop up|unders?" and "hey, I haven't sent out viruseses in a week or more, what's going on?"
Pine lets you see images. Turn on Xterm mouse reporting and assign an image-viewer helper app. Then just click on any image name and it'll pop up in a little window.
While I have my marginal gripes from time to time, Pine is basically the perfect mail reader from what I can tell. Certainly the fastest for cruising through lots of mail, dealing with attachments, etc.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
The U of C uses Mozilla as a standard, since it works on all (most?) of the platforms found on campus. They also support IE, but Mozilla is preffered.
When someone might yell at me, it has to be OpenBSD.
I duno what version of IE you are useing. When IE stops responding and you ahve to close it ALL versions of explorer get closed.
Why do people assume that if they use a web browser for email, so does everyone else?
I don't want HTML in email. I don't want to use monolithic programs. I want a mail client that works even if the browser should crash (or not exist, for that matter). I want to be able to access my mail even when I have no GUI available.
mbox format and any mbox-compliant mail client will do that for me. In a pinch, I can even use cat/tail to read mail and telnet or pipe to a mail server to send mail.
I'm sure there's someone out there that uses cat as the editor and send it with uucp too.
Anyhow, we were discussing geeks here, and I say it's a sorry excuse for a geek who doesn't understand the difference between web and email, and allows the potential security risks of parsing incoming email.
AOL users and corporate drones, sure, but are *geeks* like that now? Or has the bar been lowered for being a geek?
Regards,
--
*Art
Whats the deal with good softeware like mozilla (and all the bad software too) avoiding one of the greatest unused tools on the internet... DNS SRV records!
DNS has such great potential. It's been supported since BIND 4.x. Yes NO (yes, not one, not even the small guys) have given SRV records a try. Is there something bad about SRV that I don't see? Its incredible as far as I can tell!
-t
Follow these instructions EXACTLY: Open yer version of mozilla open up UT2003 in windowed mode Start converting a DIVX into MPEG2 format Burn a copy of Windows XP Start dictating a document using MS voice-recognition start running a 64-client Battlefield 1942 server process ... mozilla should now crash with the talkback window
... with a little more time, and a six-leaf clover..
Several of my clients companies, medium sized by NZ standards (tiny by world standards) are now standardising on Mozilla. The main reasons:
Plus, I think they all really enjoy the idea of thumbing their noses at the Microsoft bulldozer - nearly all of my clients now recognise their dependence on Microsoft, so this is an opportunity to demonstrate their disdain for the company and its practices.
A consistent complaint in this thread seems to be "Outlook isn't secure". This is silly. Besides a few bugs that had to do with scripting vulnerabilities (which are almost always traced back to IE component vulnerabilities - Outlook doesn't have its own HTML rendering engine), generally "Outlook security flaws" are viruses are activated by an ignorant user executing attachments. If the virus writers chose, they could just as easily read Mozilla's address book and email everyone in it to spread itself.
The fact that a useful tool is popular, and could potentially be used to propagate viruses if the user is a moron, does not make it insecure. Unless Mozilla encrypts its address book and does not provide any hooks to allow external applications to send mail, it is just as vulnerable as Outlook.
That being said, I personally dislike Outlook, but that doesn't justify unfounded accusations against it.
-j
I've noticed that because MS has integrated IE with the OS, when IE crashes it often brings down my whole system, requiring a reboot, but when Moz crashes the system is fine and I just need to reload Moz and keep going.
Personally I find IE crashes much more often than Moz, but even if they both crashed with the same frequency it's a much bigger hassle to recover from an IE crash.
Hmmm... I personally cant think of a single person I know who uses Mozilla, Opera, etc. We are all IT geeks, and we all are gladly using plain ol' IE.
Maybe its because we all just like stuff that works, and dont feel the need to complain about useless things like alternate web browsers.
Actaully, I tried out Opera when I first heard about it, and stopped using it for the same reason I switched from Nutscrape to IE 3.02- the damn thing crashed about every 10 minutes. IE is and has been, by far, the stability leader, at least in my experience.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
I have never had any of these problems. I am using Windows 2000, IE 6, both fully updated. I have the Macromedia stuff installed and maybe a couple other plugins.
I don't know what you people are doing.
BTW Don't use File->New Window, click on the shortcut.
"How do you know?"
I worked at Sun until May 2002. I have many friends who still work there whom I speak to daily. I often ask them about Netscape 4.7. I've long since dropped support for it on my own websites, but I'm hoping that the last few remaining holdouts will finally leave it.
If you still don't think I'm for real, ask any Sun employee what "dtmail" is. They will know exactly what you are talking about. Most of them will then go on a rant about it, just like I used to when I worked there.
"What 'standards' are you refering [sp] to?"
How about CSS1? Or nested tables? Or really, any standards-compliant markup? Don't even get me started on CSS2 or any moderately-complex CSS1 markup. My websites all validate to XHTML 1.0, but they don't work in Netscape 4. If you seriously believe that Netscape 4 works with web standards, I invite you to Google Netscape 4 sucks and read the many, MANY articles posted by infuriated web developers.
Personally, I use Mozilla, and it's great as far as standards-compliance goes. Netscape 6 is decent and Netscape 7 and 7.1 are fine. NS4, on the other hand, is a complete joke and a waste of time to develop for. It needs to disappear once and for all.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
if you check again does it say 100% slashdotted?
At Rutgers University (in New Jersey), the standard is Netscape 7 for www browser and mail. In fact, the only reason that IE is on the computer in the labs is because you can remove the damn thing. Oh yeah, outlook is nowhere to be seen.
Now consider the same in Mozilla. Mozilla crashes, you don't know why blah blah. Your first port of call is Bugzilla and best case you find the bug is already logged. Reading through the comments you learn of a trivial to workaround (e.g. disable a pref). Better yet someone has already produced a patch so you roll your own version of Moz and apply it or wait for the next and reasonably frequent milestone releases. Problem solved. If there is no bug, log one, track it, ask the community for help. If you get no response, pay whoever it might be Sun, Red Hat, Netscape / AOL $$$ to fix it.
So worst case you're no more out of pocket than you were with MS. Best case you get fast and free support, a detailed description of the issue and progress updates as it is worked on.
The reason many geeks don't like IE is precisely because it doesn't "just work". Not on the OS platform they'd like to be using.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Since August 2002, Drew has been using Mozilla as its supported IMAP mail client. It is distributed with all student laptops, lab computers, and fac/staff desktops. Previous to that, we used Netscape 4.7.
When I starting doing webdevelopment about 3.5 years ago, my and my colleagues were writing pages for Arizona State's College of Business. They're all about Microsoft so we were designing web applications for them on IE. I worked there for 2 years and by the end of it, I knew the IE DOM like the ingredients on cheetos... So I can make pretty nifty pages in IE, but the really sad thing is (of course) they never show up on mozilla or netscape. I've been trying to read up on the mozilla dom when I get time. I hope mozilla can incorporate some of IE's filters and such... could something like this be standardized? Whenever I try to stick to CSS standards, the pages never come out right on IE. So I will have to use some work arounds... IE has some pretty neat stuff but unfortunately, none of it is STANDARD!
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
My Mom has been using Mozilla for all email and web browsing for over 2 years now and she loves it, it's perfect for her. Entirely not computer savvy, she is still able to maninpulate mail folders and print and yaddayaddayadda. On an entertaining note, it took a while for me to explain to her why other people were being crippled with virii (lots in my family) and she was not... If my Mom can use it daily, without fail or lost email, it's a solid app.
Once I upgrade her hardware (she's dragging her feet, the 350 k6-2 is still ok) I'll move her from WindowMaker to KDE 3. No offense WindowMaker - you rock! - but she needs KDE.
The heat from below can burn your eyes out
You haven't tried recent versions of Firebird or Mozilla, have you. Nearly everyone who says that hasn't used Mozilla since the terrible 4.x series, or earlier even. Mozilla is now at least as stable as IE, approximate ly as fast, is open source, complies with standards, blocks pop-ups, has tabbed browsing, an extensions system... If you haven't tried it, and refuse to, you're just ignorant (and closed-minded).
I tried gOd using Mozilla. Oh well, seems to be unobtainable...unreachable. Must be Mozilla Thursday at g0d's house.
Or let's extend this to a large company, say 60,000 employees. You build new Windows computers from a standard build hosted on the network... just like Linux. You get some access to the source code for Windows and IE so you can make your own changes... just like Linux and Mozilla. You can blast the new updates out to all the computers in the company... just like Linux (there are ways, I've seen it :)).
:) Guess who wins on the bottem line in the end?
Now that we know you can do they same with Linux and Windows, let's look at the specific problem of a Mozilla bug and an IE bug.
You get an IE bug that causes all the IEs in the company to not reach your Payroll system, making it unable to submit timecards. So you open up the IE code and start to work at tracking down the problem. Since it's your own build, you don't have much support except some from MS, but they handed you the code because you paid $$$$$$$$$$ and were told you are on your own. After many many days (or weeks), the bug is solved, the patch is pushed out, and everything is rosy.
Same thing with Mozilla now. First thing you do is check bugzilla and see if the bug is already known. If it is, and their is a work about, and even code!, roll the change up and push out the update. If the bug is not solved, or is not known, add a new entry or add to the existing one with what you know. Then site down to solve the problem much like you did for IE. Expect that you have the IT staff + the mozilla community working on it, not just he IT staff. If someone else figures out the solution, roll it up and patch. If you figure it out, post the solution so no one else has to go through what you just did, roll in up and patch.
The worst case for both IE and Mozilla is that you have to spend a significant amount of time diving through code solving the problem. The best case for IE is that it doesn't take long to find the bug. The best case for Mozilla is that the solution was already on the web, and the entire thing just takes a day to get EVERYONE working again. Now factor into the picture cost. For the MS path, you have to pay MS for the code which is very expensive. For the Linux/Mozilla path, the code is free
Space for rent, inquire within
I'm trying to find out who is using Mozilla for their email. When I say "who" I mean organizationally, as I realize 99% of us geeks already use it.
This is 100% wrong and I don't understand why nobody wrote it yet. If 99% geeks use Mozilla for mail, then who uses Mutt, Pine, or Evolution? Mainstream people?
Oh, please. These same systems work perfectly well with Mozilla et al on Windows, or with Linux. I've witnessed this personally. MSIE is a load of crap with the capability to bring down the entire operating system, and Microsoft has next to zero incentive to make it otherwise.
The only thing I can possibly grant you is that in Windows, drivers are generally written by the hardware manufacturer, as opposed to maintained by people who care about how well they work after the sale has been made. But then again, that's really a point for Linux, isn't it?
Keep in mind, however, that Opera by default identifies as IE5, IE5.5, or IE6 depending on Opera's version. For all anyone knows, half of the IE "users" could be Opera users that didn't know they could change the browser ID string or thought it would be advantageous to keep it at IE so that browser detectors didn't bitch they don't have the right browser.
Plain ol' IE is right. It's plain and old. You have no idea how funny it is for me to catch myself trying to use mouse gestures or tabbed browsing when I use someone elses computer. At one time I was just like you. I didn't care about some alternate browser, especially when IE 5 was so much more stable than any version of Netscape or Opera that I had tried. You seriously need to give Mozilla a try. I recommend the Lo-Fi or IE skin, with mouse gestures installed and tabbed browsing turned on. It will seem a lot like IE, but better. Believe me.
ps - IT people are not always geeks...
Can't say I've noticed the same. I've been using XP since a month after it came out and while IE does crash every once in awhile, I can't remember it bringing down the entire system. It simply brings up a dailog asking me if I'd like to report the crash to Microsoft, I say no, and start up IE and I'm on my way. As a matter of fact I can't think of more than 1 or 2 times I've had to reboot XP due to a crash - it's just a not a common occurance.
XP and IE are very stable. I can only guess the majority of people complaining about Windows either mean Windows 9x or perhaps they don't use Windows at all and have simply read, "Windowz Suxors, It's always crashing!" so many times on Slashdot they assume it's true.
Done properly, probably not. I pulled this on my cousin. I used the IE skin and switched the icons, and loaded the plugins, and it was 2 months before she noticed. And she only noticed because the games at MSN wouldn't work (big surprise there!).
I've got a couple clients that have formally switched, using OE only for sending out because the Access guy can't figure out how to link Access to the Mozilla mail client. They haven't had a virus problem since.
At another site, IE is still the official browser, but a couple of users have discovered Mozilla's features and have switched. Still haven't convinced the boss yet. Maybe the bill from the last "I'll open this strange attachement which is really a network aware virus" incident will help change his mind. If not, well, more future billing for me.
two = "XP and IE are very stable."
if (one && two) parallel_universe();
IE is so much easier in every way.
Insert the following LINE into an html file and open it in IE:
<input type text>
I have IE 6.0.2600.0000, and this single line will crash IE producing the MS "talkback" dialog. I don't have to even load a java class file to produce the same type of behaviour. So obviously IE is superior!!!!
LOL
My recommendation was weak not due to dislike, but simply because I didn't have a lot of experience with Mozilla mail so I didn't know where it falls on the sucks-to-rules scale. But I figured it would probably work "good enough" so I gave it to them and yes, it worked.
If I didn't know Mozilla was good, why did I give it to them? Pretty much just to avoid having to spend time on research. I know there are very likely some good mail clients for Windows, but I don't know what they are, and didn't want to spend a lot of time evaluating software. So I was looking for an easy way out.
Another easy way out would have been MS Outlook since I think the machines in question probably had it preloaded. But most of our email comes from The Internet, so obviously that would be a stupid choice. If a worm/virus/trojan comes in here, it won't matter what "dumb user"'s fault it is, it'll be my mess to clean up. Just because I didn't want to spend a lot of time on research, doesn't mean I could just be completely irresponsible.
Yet another easy way out would be to use a Windows port of Sylpheed, since I know Sylpheed pretty well (and I actually like Sylpheed except for it's seemingly single-threaded nature). But the day (hour?) I was working on this, all I found was one port of Sylpheed-Claws (the bleeding edge version of Sylpheed) and it was very crashy. So I gave up on that right away (remember: I was looking for easy way out).
By picking Mozilla, I didn't have to spend time researching it, and I was able to go on to the next project. If it turns out to be inadequate for some reason, then I guess I'll have to spend more time looking. Perhaps saying we're "standardized" on Mozilla would be an overstatement. We're "standardized" on IMAP and SMTP, which is how things should be. [pedant mode on] Those are standards, Mozilla is just an implementation.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Funny you should mention speed. I was doing a demo of pop-up blocking for someone. I loaded a site I knew used them in IE, then in Mozilla (with blocking turned on) The Mozilla page load was noticibly faster. Mozilla was started later yet was finished while IE was still loading the page. Now this is hardly a scientific experiment or benchmark, but it impressed the user. The fact it loaded faster and no pop-ups to deal with made an excellent demo. The blocked pop-up may be why it loaded faster though, but hey, a good demo is a good demo.
http://www.usask.ca
Mozilla is the standard in most of the labs. The only ones that don't have moz are the really old machines, which use Netscape 4.something.
Here's my sites measly percentage stats. Skewed in favor of Mozilla.
1. Mozilla 1.x 55.8 %
2. Internet Explorer 6.x 25.6 %
3. Internet Explorer 5.x 14.0 %
4. Netscape 7.x 4.7 %
Of course I just started it up, so 1/2 of that Mozilla is probably me and my template editor. Next time I check, It'll probably be dead.
Anyway, I use Mozilla at work, but I log ago gave up the futile effort of trying to convince some of the older people I work with that Mozilla is NOT some piece of "Shareware that my kids told me not to run". Whatever. I *do* occasionally convert someone in non-business circles to switch.
VOTE!
Your sig link? I have sigs turned off, and I use Mozilla. Who's to say most IE users aren't smart enough to turn sigs off, and the Mozilla users are. Though real geeks make their own browser from scratch. ;-)
You forgot to mention, this only happens with 16 MB RAM.
"I haven't lost my mind -- it's just backed up on tape somewhere."
until we were taken over by the Microsoft cabal. Now we've moved everything to some zarking MS POS-compliant software and I spend all day rebooting or restarting my machine. Funny though, I run all of the things I deem critical on Mozilla, and I never have that problem. However the decision was not made because of problems with Mozilla but because of bundled discounts for the software, you know, use ALL Microsoft software, and we'll throw in exchange and give you a break on licenses. Yeah, no collusion here, move along, nothing to see.
try a little bit harder :P You need to hack the registry in order for it to work super-nicely... see this post for details...
I have not found a mail system as stable as Outlook with an Exchange server.
Outlook is a good program. Hell, all of office is pretty top-notch if you ask me. I'd buy it if they had a Linux version (Crossover Office is good but it's still not nearly as good as a native app..)
Outlook has a lot of nice features, the in-box rules are very easy to create and manage, and has more then a handful of other features that, in my opinion, set it apart from many other e-mail clients.
When coupled with an Exchange server, you get excellent seamless server-side storage of messages. IMAP can come close, but you still need local copies of your messages if you expect to do anything useful with them. Searches and such are all done on the server, eliminating network load. Many in-box rules will also run on the server-end, so even when Outlook isn't running, the rules still trigger and messages can be moved around your mailbox.
POP3 and IMAP definately have their place for internet-based e-mail services, but when it comes down to internal office e-mail, Outlook and Exchange just work better.
I'm not an advocate of Microsoft by any means, but I also don't ignore good software because of who makes it. MS Office is good, it's easy, and you can do a lot of stuff with it. OpenOffice is very good as well, no doubt about that, but MS Office is good too. And it comes with Outlook.
I'm waiting for the day when there's a Linux-Based e-mail system that's as good as the Outlook and Exchange combination. The other day there was a good discussion about Open Source alternatives to Exchange, and even with the ones that weren't free, nothing for Linux really impressed me. I think that if you need to use Linux on the backend, Lotus Domino is still the best choice.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
ever since, say, ages ago, Mozilla had the option of using quoted-printable with News and mail. not News or mail, but News and Mail. so to those of us who need Latin 1, Mozilla could be used for News or Mail, but not both.
And that's why we European geeks eschew Mozilla.
-- Rolf Lindgren, cand.psychol
...so I'm not the only one who notices that IE's Stop button sometimes... doesn't? That bugged me a lot back when I used it, but nobody else I knew had that problem (or noticed it... a lot of my friends are computer-dumb).
Even with Mozilla v1.4, I still have problems printing under Windows:
p ?p roduct_code=301859&pfp=BROWSE (only one page?)
b le t_PC/4505-3122_7-20711028.html?tag=dir (first page is a waste -- big gap)
URLs for examples:
http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.as
http://reviews.cnet.com/Toshiba_Port_g__3505_Ta
Thank you in advance.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).