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By rkent, on January 27th, 2009 As I fight my usually losing battle to use my computer tools to get better organized, I’ve come to understand that the major enemy is information fragmentation. My world consists of emails, web bookmarks, calendar items, blog postings and comments, forum threads, to-do items, bugs, notes, files, contacts, projects, etc., etc., and each of these have a variety of often mutually exclusive applications to manage them. Each clever new idea – Facebook, Twitter, whatever – adds a new dimension to an already overwhelming problem.
And so far, I have only mentioned one dimension of information fragmentation, that of application fragmentation. [...]
By rkent, on January 24th, 2009 The last couple of weeks, I’ve been focused on killing some backend database bugs in Thunderbird that seemed to have popped up recently – including bugs 471682, 472446, and 471130. I’ve still got more database-related issues that I want to see solved before TB3. I am determined to make sure that the message database in Mozilla Mailnews is robust and reliable – which has not always been a priority in the past.
Maybe this would be a good time to say why I care.
There’s a class of applications that I want to pursue, that are probably best described as [...]
By rkent, on January 16th, 2009 Today I will write in a more practical direction, describing how to setup Thunderbird with MesQuilla extensions to control notification.
Under stock Thunderbird, notification of arriving emails (sometimes called BIFF) may be controlled in two ways – and both of these are system-wide settings. These features are controlled from the General/Options dialog:
“Show an alert” adds a small popup in the system tray when an email is received, while “Play a sound” can play a single system-wide sound.
Now if you have a complex setup, then this is not nearly enough control to be practical. I for example have [...]
By rkent, on January 10th, 2009 I added enough functionality to TaQuilla this week to make it fully functional as a soft-tagging extension. I’m now running it regularly in my main profile, though I am only soft tagging for Personal at the moment. I’m very happy with how well the statistics are working, as it seems quite accurate after just a little training.
Soft tags are enabled in a setup screen that lists all of my tags, whether they are enabled, and also whether I want to show diagnostic and status columns in the thread pane.
Checking “Status Column” shows soft-tagging status for each message [...]
By rkent, on January 1st, 2009 Today for the first time I am able to run TaQuilla on my main email profile. This extension uses the same statistical bayesian filters used for spam detection, to instead automatically apply tags to emails. My initial trials are very encouraging.
I enabled soft tags on a “Personal” tag, to track emails that are associated with my personal life. I trained about 10 emails – a few from a current thread with my family, a message from my church, and a Netflix notice. I picked also a few bugmails and trained them as not personal. Then I applied the soft [...]
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