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Month: January 2009

Backing Up Tons of Email

Published by Will Chatham on 1/18/2009

MailStore HomeI have about a dozen email accounts I try to manage locally with Thunderbird.  By and large, things run pretty smoothly until I need to move it all, as I did recently when upgrading from XP to Vista.

I have been a big fan of MozBackup in the past, but as my email accounts grew and I had more and more email stored in folders, MozBackup started taking a long time to process it all.  After my move to Vista, I realized I had over 2GB of mail backed up, and restoring it from Mozbackup didn’t work.  It recreated all my accounts and folders, but all the folders were empty.

After the initial panic faded, I found some forum threads discussing the manual opening of MozBackup archives and restoration of email.  I finally got it all back, but it wasn’t without more than a few sweat bullets hitting the keyboard.

Since this episode, I have been looking for something to put my mind at ease in regards to email storage, backup, and even reduction. I don’t know why I had never heard of it, but I stumbled across MailStore, which offers a free home version called, get this, MailStore Home.

MailStore Home will back up and archive email from many different clients, including Outlook, Thunderbird, Exchange, GMail, Yahoo mail, and others. At first I thought it was too good to be true, but after installing it I was quickly impressed with the simplicity and ease of use.

I had soon archived my two biggest email accounts, and even burned them to DVD through the MailStore application itself. Knowing DVD’s aren’t indestructible, I also backed up the archive using Carbonite (another of my favorite apps).

Going back into a MailStore archive is very easy, and it lets you read email, open, and even search mail and contents of attachments.

Once I was convinced that I had succesfully archived and backed up all my email, I was able to go through my Inboxes and delete over 1GB of email.  Hopefully, this will allow MozBackup to run more smoothly, if I ever really need it again in the first place.

If you find yourself with an unweildy inbox and a nagging feeling that you haven’t done anything to back it  up, go grab MailStore Home now.

mailStore Home: http://www.mailstore.com/en/mailstore-home.aspx

OpenJDK6 – Java 1.6.x on CentOS 5.x

Published by DB Cooper on 1/16/2009

Just a quick tip that might help out the folks needing something better than gcj and still using an open version of Java.

On CentOS 5.2 :

rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-2.noarch.rpm
yum install -y java-1.6.0-openjdk-plugin java-1.6.0-openjdk-devel java-1.6.0-openjdk

😉

Hope that makes someone’s life easier!

I’m Back!

Published by Will Chatham on 1/16/2009

As you may have noticed, I ditched my blog here at www.willchatham.com back in October in favor of trying out  Tumblr. I ended up enjoying the Tumblr service, and I will probably still use it occasionally.

However, WordPress 2.7 came out, and after trying it on some of my other blog sites, I soon realized I really wanted THIS site to have it again.

So, here I am, with a brand new theme to boot!

I have a few things I plan on doing to spruce this place up, including a brand new message board.  That’s right–it’s the return of the Gangsta Haiku Repository!

Stay tuned…

Google Notebook Is Being Ditched

Published by Will Chatham on 1/15/2009

Move Your Web Clippings Out of Google Notebook.  Now.  The free service has already stopped allowing new registrations, and will no longer be updated.

I can’t express the grief I have over this, as I have been a hardcore Notebook user since I discovered it about 9 months ago.

In case you haven’t heard of it, Google Notebook is a tool which allows you to save clippings, notes, and bookmarks which you run across while cruising around the information highway.  It’s easy to save parts of web pages using the Notebook plugin for Firefox, and you can add bookmarks, pictures, and notes, and to boot.

There are alternative services offered, the most popular of which seems to be Evernote, but being forced to switch services is just not cool, not matter how good they might be.

I have had an Evernote account for quite a while, but I never used it because I preferred Google Notebook’s ease of use and simplicity.  The worst part is that in order to import half of what I have saved in Google Notebook, I will have to purchase Evernote’s premium service and do it all by hand.

So, check back soon for an Evernote review!