It downloaded the messages for the folder I chose, and I can now read them when I go offline. It does seem to be downloading messages; I'll let you know when it's finished. However my recollection is that it's done this in the past but then in fact had items missing subsequently. Still, fingers crossed it's something that was fixed, or I was doing something wrong previously.
However I see what you are looking for. There is no indication that Thunderbird will automatically sync this folder in the future for me, so it would be a pain to do this every time I wanted to make sure my offline folders were synced up. Exactly. Currently it's sitting churning through a download of 11,000 odd messages. Ok, that's not something I'll need to do every time, but a few big attachments in received mail and I'll have a five minute wait before I can walk away from my desk even setting aside the fact that I have to remember to synch up in the first place.
Maybe TB 3 will have the auto sync feature. I won't hold my breath. Previous "upgrades" have been almost exclusively cosmetic in nature from my POV (I don't doubt that bugs were fixed, but they weren't ones that affected me much if at all). For the most part, Thunderbird is almost exactly the same to my eye as Messenger was once upon a time. Not an entirely bad thing, but it hasn't shone as much as its cousin Firefox which is genuinely more useful to me than its earlier incarnations.
Heaven forbid that someone change the subject of an email! :-) I've definitely confused GMail users in the past by doing exactly that!
Of course one possibility is that this was a conscious decision - in practice people usually don't change the subject when they're replying, whereas some users use "reply" (and then change the subject - sometimes) in order to start a new conversation thread.
I think that for normal message threads Thunderbird already supports both modes, and if that's the case the default already seems to be my preferred message ID based mechanism.
Lacking the conversation view seems a curious omission given that it seems to have most of the necessary supporting logic for threading. Maybe the Thunderbird dev's just don't use GMail.
(Just doing so now) Even if it does, it's not ideal incidentally - I want this to be something that happens in background, not something time-consuming that I have to explicitly request every time I want to take the laptop away from my desk.
I've tried a lot of combinations. Nothing that I can do seems to persuade it to download ALL messages in all folders such that all of their content is available when I really am offline. Hold on and I'll have another go - who knows maybe it got fixed last time it automagically updated, but I ain't holding my breath.
As already noted the first suggestion does not in fact work, and the second point is failing to understand the difference between "message threads" and "conversation threading."
Nope, I've had it happen with multiple POP3 accounts, and last time I looked there was a bug raised about it but no activity on it. It doesn't happen every week, it's more like once a year or so - but it's sufficiently annoying when it happens that POP3 isn't usable.
My suspicion is that it's related to very large numbers of messages; I leave all my messages in the POP3 account. Probably the issue will go away if I don't do that, but that will create other problems and inconveniences for me. Using IMAP is a sufficient work-around, but that then suffers from the "not downloading" problem (which I can live with) so it's swings and roundabouts.
Well, I guess that's one way to achieve it - but I have no desire to put my sent items into the inbox! I just want the ability to view them in that manner from time to time. In general I want to keep the distinction.
No. That's a threaded view, not a conversation view.
A conversation view shows both sides of the exchange in a threaded format, allowing you to recap on a discussion without having to constantly flip between the Inbox and Sent Mail views.
Gmail's conversation view shows your messages and the replies of your correspondent in context. It is, if you will, a combined threaded view of your inbox and outbox at the same time.
The only problem with GMail's conversation view is that it uses Subject rather than Message ID. While the threaded view in Thunderbird does indeed use Message ID, it only ever shows one half of the conversation (and I'm not sure how or if it handles multiple correspondents in a conversation).
It's not an enormously big deal for me, but it's not a feature that's currently in Thunderbird. I would use it if it were available and I suspect that for GMail users it would be a big deal.
I use Thunderbird for all my email. I got used to the Netscape Messenger when I migrated from Pine a few years back, and I liked it enough to move to Thunderbird later on. It's a nice enough mail package. I do have some gripes though:
If you use POP3 on really hefty mailboxes it occasionally decides that all the messages are "new" and downloads them all again. Very annoying.
If you use IMAP there seems to be no easy way to tell it to always download a local copy of all messages in all folders. Perhaps there's a magic flag somewhere that I haven't found, but the closest I seem to be able to find is downloading the text of the messages that I've read (not the same thing).
There's no conversation-style view of messages. This would be a killer feature as even GMail seems to do it wrong (threading by subject text instead of message Id)
Still, it's good enough - I don't have much to complain about and I still like it a lot more than Outlook.
Ian Griffiths implemented a deep zoom for the BBC in their Big Weekend festival. Rather pleasingly they chose to call it the "Big Zoomy Thing" in a nice bit of anti-jargon.
I've bought a few Baen ebook. Couple of issues. Firstly the proof reading doesn't seem to be that good. Lots of typos. I don't know if these are pre-proofs and the paper copies are better, or not, since as far as I know I've never bought one of their hard copies. Secondly their site is a poorly structured making it moderately hard to find a book unless you know exactly what you're looking for.
Aside from those two niggles I have no complaints; the downloads were effectively instantaneous and the price was good. They have quite a few free taster books there as well, which is nice. I paid for my copies once I'd read and liked them as a gesture in favour of their DRM-free policy.
Obviously people are using their iPods to play music, but they chose the iPod over the Zune or one of the millions of other players to make a fashion statement. Nope. I got one. I loathe Apple laptops and OSX. I am definitively unfashionable.
I adore the iPod because it scratches the instant gratification itch. Want the Prokofiev violin concertos (I told you I was unfashionable) on your MP3 player? Plug in ipod. Click, click. (Downloading. Syncing). Unplug. Listen.
The difference between "click, click" and "go to website, login, buy music, download, drag to music device" may be trivial to you, but it's not to real consumers. And that's why the iPod is such a hit.
At the very least, people are buying iPods because everyone else is doing it People try iPods because they know someone who owns one. They buy them because they then find them easy to use. This is orthogonal to your argument. Once they have bought one they're unlikely to move to something else of course, which is the other reason they're so prevalent - my other MP3 players were duds. My upgrade will clearly be an iPod unless something goes horribly wrong at Apple.
If the buffet really was "All you can eat" then I would have no problem with the constraints. When it's "All you can eat (fair eatage policy applies)" then, as I say, they can bite me.
Don't be fooled by marketing.
You don't pay by the MB, GB or anything like that. Unless your "unlimited" policy really is unlimited, yes you do. They just market it as if it weren't true, and you can't pay less in return for using less than the fixed amount that they're selling you.
In the UK that's precisely what they do. For example, grabbed from Tiscali's site:
Unlimited downloads. This great value package offers you unlimited downloads every month. Download movies and music, play games online, watch video clips and listen to the radio. Fair usage policy applies. It is not "Unlimited downloads" if a "fair usage policy" says it's limited.
when you sign on for internet you agree it's for your household, apartment, or whatever, not for you to provide publicly Not necessarily true, but even where it is they can, frankly, bite me. Since they sell unlimited bandwidth and then put in teeny small print to say, effectively "unlimited does not mean unlimited" I don't have much of a problem with ignoring their unnecessary restrictions. Remember, this is a breach of contract at worst.
My electricity and water suppliers are not able to put these restrictive terms into their contracts, I see no reason why I should respect the internet suppliers' attempts to do so.
And to answer my own question, I asked Lewis Page by email, and in fact it was the MPs on the transport committee. In his own words: "Perhaps I should have said Westminster MPs. I was just trying to avoid too many uses of UK, British etc." Fair enough.
There are 645 MPs in the UK, of which only 74 are in London. Quite why they should be supposed to have some special insight into Galileo or farming subsidies is beyond me.
Why use a scalpel to remove a liver when you can just beam it out? This is my theory as to why they don't seem to have any lavatories on the star ships. The duty teleportationist is in charge of beaming the crap out of you (literally). Don't give him a hard time, though, or he'll "accidentally" take out your small intestine as well.
I should have, but too lazy. It's barely usable and it was cheap. Bad enough to ruin the brand, good enough not to be worth returning.
That's one of the problems big companies have; they might not find out how much damage a product has done until they fail to make the next sale. And that's invisible.
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Of course one possibility is that this was a conscious decision - in practice people usually don't change the subject when they're replying, whereas some users use "reply" (and then change the subject - sometimes) in order to start a new conversation thread.
I think that for normal message threads Thunderbird already supports both modes, and if that's the case the default already seems to be my preferred message ID based mechanism.
Lacking the conversation view seems a curious omission given that it seems to have most of the necessary supporting logic for threading. Maybe the Thunderbird dev's just don't use GMail.
(Just doing so now) Even if it does, it's not ideal incidentally - I want this to be something that happens in background, not something time-consuming that I have to explicitly request every time I want to take the laptop away from my desk.
I've tried a lot of combinations. Nothing that I can do seems to persuade it to download ALL messages in all folders such that all of their content is available when I really am offline. Hold on and I'll have another go - who knows maybe it got fixed last time it automagically updated, but I ain't holding my breath.
As already noted the first suggestion does not in fact work, and the second point is failing to understand the difference between "message threads" and "conversation threading."
Nope, I've had it happen with multiple POP3 accounts, and last time I looked there was a bug raised about it but no activity on it. It doesn't happen every week, it's more like once a year or so - but it's sufficiently annoying when it happens that POP3 isn't usable.
My suspicion is that it's related to very large numbers of messages; I leave all my messages in the POP3 account. Probably the issue will go away if I don't do that, but that will create other problems and inconveniences for me. Using IMAP is a sufficient work-around, but that then suffers from the "not downloading" problem (which I can live with) so it's swings and roundabouts.
Well, I guess that's one way to achieve it - but I have no desire to put my sent items into the inbox! I just want the ability to view them in that manner from time to time. In general I want to keep the distinction.
No. That's a threaded view, not a conversation view.
A conversation view shows both sides of the exchange in a threaded format, allowing you to recap on a discussion without having to constantly flip between the Inbox and Sent Mail views.
Gmail's conversation view shows your messages and the replies of your correspondent in context. It is, if you will, a combined threaded view of your inbox and outbox at the same time.
The only problem with GMail's conversation view is that it uses Subject rather than Message ID. While the threaded view in Thunderbird does indeed use Message ID, it only ever shows one half of the conversation (and I'm not sure how or if it handles multiple correspondents in a conversation).
It's not an enormously big deal for me, but it's not a feature that's currently in Thunderbird. I would use it if it were available and I suspect that for GMail users it would be a big deal.
That's what I would have expected, but it doesn't appear to do so.
Still, it's good enough - I don't have much to complain about and I still like it a lot more than Outlook.
Did the paragraph die at the same time as paper?
Ian Griffiths implemented a deep zoom for the BBC in their Big Weekend festival. Rather pleasingly they chose to call it the "Big Zoomy Thing" in a nice bit of anti-jargon.
I've bought a few Baen ebook. Couple of issues. Firstly the proof reading doesn't seem to be that good. Lots of typos. I don't know if these are pre-proofs and the paper copies are better, or not, since as far as I know I've never bought one of their hard copies. Secondly their site is a poorly structured making it moderately hard to find a book unless you know exactly what you're looking for.
Aside from those two niggles I have no complaints; the downloads were effectively instantaneous and the price was good. They have quite a few free taster books there as well, which is nice. I paid for my copies once I'd read and liked them as a gesture in favour of their DRM-free policy.
I adore the iPod because it scratches the instant gratification itch. Want the Prokofiev violin concertos (I told you I was unfashionable) on your MP3 player? Plug in ipod. Click, click. (Downloading. Syncing). Unplug. Listen.
The difference between "click, click" and "go to website, login, buy music, download, drag to music device" may be trivial to you, but it's not to real consumers. And that's why the iPod is such a hit. At the very least, people are buying iPods because everyone else is doing it People try iPods because they know someone who owns one. They buy them because they then find them easy to use. This is orthogonal to your argument. Once they have bought one they're unlikely to move to something else of course, which is the other reason they're so prevalent - my other MP3 players were duds. My upgrade will clearly be an iPod unless something goes horribly wrong at Apple.
If the buffet really was "All you can eat" then I would have no problem with the constraints. When it's "All you can eat (fair eatage policy applies)" then, as I say, they can bite me.
As a matter of fact it is and I can't say it bothers me very much. I dare say my publishers feel differently.
My electricity and water suppliers are not able to put these restrictive terms into their contracts, I see no reason why I should respect the internet suppliers' attempts to do so.
And to answer my own question, I asked Lewis Page by email, and in fact it was the MPs on the transport committee. In his own words: "Perhaps I should have said Westminster MPs. I was just trying to avoid too many uses of UK, British etc." Fair enough.
You're telling me there's stuff outside zone 3?
Why London's MPs? What's so special about them?
There are 645 MPs in the UK, of which only 74 are in London. Quite why they should be supposed to have some special insight into Galileo or farming subsidies is beyond me.
I should have, but too lazy. It's barely usable and it was cheap. Bad enough to ruin the brand, good enough not to be worth returning.
That's one of the problems big companies have; they might not find out how much damage a product has done until they fail to make the next sale. And that's invisible.