Rubénerd!

In the spirit of @Jeorgina consolidation, I decided to see if SeaMonkey could also be used as a Google Reader replacement!

Many of these tips should also work in Thunderbird, but I haven't tested it. Feel free to leave a comment with your own experiences if you choose to try it out!

Setting it up for feeds

SeaMonkey Mail (SMM) works around the concept of accounts. Much as you would create a new email or newsgroup account, to subscribe to web feeds you create a special "Blogs and Newsfeeds account."

1. Navigate to File → New → Account
2. Choose "Blogs and News Feeds"
3. Give it any arbitrary name. I was boring and called it "Feeds"

In your SMM sidebar, you should now see an account with the familiar square orange web feed icon alongside your mail and newsgroup accounts. Consolidation and simplification to the MAX! ^_^

Subscribing to feeds

As I found with Google Reader, creating folders to organise your feeds is easier to do before you subscribe to feeds.

1. Right click your feeds account
2. Choose "New Folder"
3. Give it a unique name, and optionally choose a parent folder. Yes, you can have a hierarchy, such as "apple" under "tech"! Take that Google Reader!

Then its simple enough to subscribe to feeds:

1. Right click your feeds account
2. Choose "Subscribe"
3. Enter the feed URL, and choose a folder to download them to.
4. Optionally, you can also hit Import to download feeds from an OPML file, pretty slick!

Caveats

One thing that caught me out initially was that SMM downloads article from feeds into folders like email, rather than just displaying them in folders like Google Reader. As Mozilla notes:

Removing or changing the folder for a feed will not affect previously downloaded articles.

If you decide to change the folder for a feed, this just means you need to drag and drop any previously downloaded entries into the new folder as well.

Thoughts

I've been using SMM to read all my web feeds for about two weeks now, and so far it's been a more than capable replacement for Google Reader. Having my feeds in the same window as my newsgroups and email accounts has also been so gosh darn convenient!

Downloading and using SeaMonkey (or Thunderbird) just for web feeds might be overkill, but if you already use it, give it a try with your feeds. I'm thoroughly enjoying myself :)

Having moved from the Mozilla Application Suite to Phoenix 0.2 in the mean old days, I'm giving SeaMonkey a try and am really liking it.

Sea-what?

Aside from those on Twitter who asked me why would you do that lol!111!!eleventy!, many didn't seem to know what SeaMonkey was. As well as an adorable aquatic critter, SeaMonkey is a web browser, email client, html editor, address book, IRC client, newsgroup client, RSS aggregator, positron accelerator, coffee machine and working implementation of the Haber Process. Believe it.

SeaMonkey is the community driven continuation of the Mozilla Application Suite which Mozilla originally spun off Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox and Thunderbird from. The Mozilla Application Suite in turn was based off the original Netscape Communicator, the dominant WWW client software for much of the late 1990s.

SeaMonkey Mail

I've been a heavy Thunderbird user for years, predominantly because it allowed me to easily import my existing Mozilla data at the time. Unfortunately, I've haven't liked some of the changes in the 3.x series. The new tab UI feels inconsistent and confusing. I preferred the old way of searching which quickly returned results in the same view, and without expensive indexes being constantly built. And so on.

SeaMonkey Mail reminds me of the Thunderbird 2.x series, which in my opinion was the best graphical email client since that one that was bundled with Cooee (whatever that was called) and the older versions of Eudora. It detected my Thunderbird user data, and had all my accounts and gigs of messages imported in a few short minutes. Understandable given they largely share a common codebase, but still impressive.

I've added all my email accounts from Thunderbird and [[re-]al]pine, subscribed to all my newsgroups from Pan, and have even replaced the now unusable (in my opinion) Google Reader with it for web feeds and whatnot. Four applications in one! ^^

SeaMonkey Navigator

Given I'm using SeaMonkey for my mail, I figured I'd try using it as my browser in place of Firefox as well. The current 2.5 release is based off Firefox 8.0, and as such supports the same HTML5 and CSS3 goodies.

I was impressed at how many of my critical Firefox extensions like NoScript, Ghostery and Simple Clocks work flawlessly in SeaMonkey. Unfortunately, Tree Style Tab doesn't, and currently I haven't been able to find an available replacement extension that puts my tabs on the side, ala Opera. For someone who has dozens of online docs open at a time, this is really important! I have a newsgroup thread and a post on mozillaZine about it, we'll see if anyone can help out.

Functionally, I've noticed no difference using SeaMonkey Navigator over Firefox other than perhaps in memory usage. SeaMonkey uses less memory than Firefox and Thunderbird combines, which again I suppose makes sense.

What are we up to now? Five applications in one! ^^

Conclusions

Over all (is what people wear on farms) I'm surprised by how quick I've taken to this software.

The minimalist in me likes that I've replaced two icons with one in my dock. I like that with a CMD-1 I can get to a browser, and CMD-2 I can read practically all my internet communications in one window. It even comes with the "Modern" theme from the old days, which contains so much retro win I have it set as my default theme for now.

I'll be keeping Firefox for now just in case, but I haven't launched it since last Thursday.

Heartfelt thanks to Philip Chee, Karsten Düsterloh, Jens Hatlak, Robert Kaiser, Ian Neal, Neil Rashbrook, Andrew Schultz, Justin Wood, and all the others in the SeaMonkey community for your tireless efforts :).

Today’s Wait, What Screenshot? (hey, that rhymes) comes to us from my installation of Mozilla Thunderbird, taken around lunchtime. According to Thunderbird, it downloaded 4,294,967,295 new messages during that session. There’s a bad pun about the sound a crazy bird makes in there somewhere.

Must be all my hate mail, or all my date rejection letters.

Are you fed up with constantly checking and deleting messages from your UniSA student email account because of the tiny quota? Turns out you can have your messages redirected to an outside account. I can breathe easier now!

From the UniSA email FAQ:

Students are able to redirect their email to either a University staff account, or to an external account by filling in the required details in the Email Redirection application located at:

https://my.unisa.edu.au/emailredirection

Further information regarding the application is located at:
Email Redirection Further Information

WARNING!

I'm being told by my solicitors I have to dispense with the following warning. By redirecting your university email the burden is on you to keep it secure and backed up. If you don't understand this, do not do it! Read the further information link above for more disclaimers.

Okay, back to the blog post

To make life easier for myself I went ahead and created a new email account with SegPub which I have gigabytes of space free on, then used the form above to redirect my student email to it instead. Now when I have lecturers email me PDFs showing the schematics of entire nuclear reactors it won't blow out my quota and prevent other messages from arriving!

There's also another benefit; by redirecting messages I no longer have to interface at all with the university's Microsoft Exchange services including the dreadful Microsoft Outlook Web Access which only works in Internet Explorer, as I discussed previously.

The IMAP problem

Inevitably the question arises: why didn't I just use IMAP and access my email remotely? I was asked by more than a few people on twitter, and by the technical support guy I called at UniSA.

My problem was I initially went ahead and configured Thunderbird (I upgraded from Mozilla/SeaMonkey Mail) for IMAP access, but unlike POP after I'd downloaded messages they stayed on the server. That's how it's supposed to work, but I wanted to archive local copies of my messages while deleting them from the university's servers, so I'd avoid maxing out my inbox like I was virtually every day before.

On a somewhat related note, I've been having no end of trouble with my university email and with general online student services since resuming full time studies. Perhaps I'm anomaly in the system.

Despite the availability of an official build of Mozilla Firefox for Mac OS X I've always liked and preferred using Camino, not because it shares it's name with a liqueur, but because it uses Aqua instead of Mozilla's standard user interface. This means it's noticeably zippier when running and starting up, the binary is much smaller and the design matches all my other Mac programmes. As Mark Shuttleworth, the South African behind Ubuntu Linux and the first African in space so famously put it: Pretty is a feature!

That said I've been a user of Mozilla Thunderbird for a long time, mostly for future proofing reasons. Because it's open source and the data files it generates are also readable on other platforms it just made me feel more comfortable. I'm always imagining a scenario in the future where I switch over to Linux or FreeBSD full time; I would hate to move across all that data.

With all the work I have these days it's so liberating when a piece of software comes out that just makes life simpler... and look better. Am I right?

In this case I stumbled upon a new email client for Mac OS X called Correo. It's at a fairly rudimentary stage right now but it's fun to tinker around with. I can't wait for it to be really fleshed out.