medici

I have to add my $0.02 here. I've been using TCH for many years, and have setup several of my clients with TCH hosting accounts. Unfortunately, I find that I cannot recommend TCH anymore, and in fact am actively moving my customers to another company. And the sole reason for this change is the lack of responsive customer service and technical support. I am sure that TCH's support is great when you want to figure out how to get Outlook or Eudora to send/receive mail. They probably do a fantastic job with helping people upload vacation pictures and add bulletin boards to their family websites. But when you are a business, even a non-profit business, and your e-mail is down it is costing you money: money spent on consultants to fix the problem, money wasted on staff trying to find other ways to exchange information, money lost when new or existing customers can't get immediate response to their questions or problems. At this very minute I've had a customer, a TCH client for two years, that is unable to send email for four days because Server26 refuses to acknowledge their Exchange server has authenticated via POP3, (even though it does so every 15 minutes to pick-up new messages), and therefore refuses to relay mail to external targets. No changes have happened on the customer end -- they don't even have the admin password to logon to their server to make changes. I spent several hours troubleshooting the problem in detail, including manual SMTP and POP3 transactions, checking DNS, network traffic capture and analysis, before opening a ticket. I put detailed information, including a transaction of my manual POP3 and SMTP transactions, into that ticket. Yet EVERY SINGLE RESPONSE from tech support tells me the same thing: I must POP before I can SMTP. If they just READ THE TICKET they would see that I already tested this, they would see the transcripts. Each time I reply that I've already tested POP3 before SMTP and refer them to the transcript in the ticket, I get another response that I must POP before SMTP. This is INSANITY! Another 24 hours have gone by and nobody at TCH has even STARTED TO INVESTIGATE THE RELAYHOSTS PROBLEM because they read the first 10 words of my ticket and regurgitate the same nonsense. If I could just TALK TO SOMEONE I know I could get them to understand this is a RELAYHOSTS problem and get a systems engineer working on the issue. But I can't use IM from most customer locations (SOX security restrictions) and there is no voice support from TCH. And, like you, my customers get annoyed when I have to charge them hundreds of dollars to keep on beating on TCH to fix TCH's problem, but I also can't afford to give my services away for free. If TCH had voice support the past 24 hours worth of non-progress would have taken 10 minutes elapsed time to diagnose the problem, the customer would have had their mail back up one day sooner, and I would have only needed to bill them $100 without losing any money. So my customers are moving to a hosting service that provides 24x7 telephone support, and even though they'll pay $25/month instead of $5-10, they will hopefully save at least $300/year on my services and at least two days of downtime.

First off, Thunderbird is an email client, not a full-featured organizer a la Microsoft Outlook. I've been using Thunderbird for about 6 months now for my personal email, and can tell you the following pros and cons: Pros Quicker and smaller than Outlook. Excellent Basian-based junk email filtering Excellent sorting and filtering capabilities Nice look and feel Easy to configure and reliable Good notification features Works on-line and off-line Themes, Skins, Plug-ins and Extensions available Free/Open Source Software Good security (image/html blocking w/override and trusted sender recognition) Cons E-mail only - there is an address book, but no calendar or task list Address book not recognized by 3rd-party apps (i.e., Fax, Word) Potential compatibility issues with antivirus software Note: A calendar is coming. Check out Sunbird, an iCal-based F/OSS calendar from Mozilla.org. On the antivirus software issue: AFAIK, no antivirus software specifically works with or understands Thunderbird. As a result, it is possible for you to a.) download an email containing a virus to your inbox, then b.) have your antivirus detect the virus when its written to disk, and c.) have the antivirus quarantine or delete your inbox file, causing you to lose all the other messages in that file. I believe this happened to me once, but I didn't have anything important in my inbox at the time, and it hasn't happened in three months, so I didn't spend any time investigating further. I also haven't heard of anyone else experiencing this issue. So it might have been something else. On the multiple mailbox issue: As you add new email accounts you can determine whether you want them to go into the global folders or into separate folders. I do both: I have accounts on several different systems that I aggregate into one set of global folders, and then speciality accounts for less trusted needs that go into their own, separate folders. -- Mark

I find that MSIE, Firefox, Mozilla and Opera all allocate more and more resources the longer they are open. On a notebook -- even with 1GB RAM -- swapping to pagefile is painful because of the slower HDD. Ditto for closing/re-opening browsers. But you're right: don't matter how fast if you can't see the content!