The Blog of Xangis

I’ve recently switched from Microsoft Outlook 2003 to Mozilla Thunderbird. This completes the chageover to using open source software exclusively for my magazine publishing workflow.

For anyone who has used Microsoft Outlook I don’t have to go into great detail about all of the problems and annoyances, but there are two that pushed me over the edge.

The first I have been dealing with during my whole Outlook experience is the fact that Outlook likes to freeze for a few seconds at a time without reason, as if it were doing some intensive processing. I could understand it doing this when I’m performing some sort of intensive action, like searching a thousand or so messages for a line of text, but it happens in places where it has no business happening, like in the middle of composing a message. I don’t have spelling or grammar checking turned on - it just hangs randomly and for no obvious reason.

The second is that I started it up to find an entire folder tree containing about 1200 messages missing. This was the folder where I store emails about stories submitted to All Possible Worlds magazine. It would have been a disaster if these emails weren’t automatically generated by the submissions database. So, even though I still have all of my sent replies and all of the database entries, and all of the files are stored both on the database server and on a subversion server, the convenient and easy-to-access log was destroyed.

It wasn’t just accidentally deleted - it wasn’t in the trash. I received no error messages, nothing about messages being corrupted, it was just gone. For someone who runs their entire business from Outlook this would have been a showstopper. I’ve seen other small-press fiction magazines severely damaged or even destroyed due to loss of an inbox.

At one point I had used a much earlier version of Mozilla Thunderbird. I toyed with it for a week but ultimately uninstalled it. My reaction at the time was “This looks like a clone of Outlook Express, but it’s not as mature and doesn’t work as well. Maybe it’ll be good someday.” Well, now that I had decided it was time to switch, Thunderbird seemed like the logical choice thanks to its steady progress toward usefulness.

It took me about two days to get used to the interface, but now that I have I’m never going back to Microsoft for an email client. Thunderbird is just so smooth, easy to use, efficient, and reliable. There are other advantages to open source if you’re a programmer - like having access to well-documented file formats and an open plugin architecture - but one important thing for me is that it has an easy-to-identify and easy-to-relocate message database structure.

Why is this important? Because since this incident I’ve started keeping backups of my inbox and folders. If email is important to your business it’s stupid not to. It was something I had always meant to do with Outlook, but just hadn’t. Now, instead of a bloated “Outlook.pst” file, Thunderbird has a file for each folder, allowing imports, exports, per-folder and partial backups and restores, and better manageability in general.

As a computer programmer, I’ve found that Subversion works very well for just about any type of file backup. I use it to keep backup copies of documents, source code, binaries, contracts, just about everything. It saves a lot of effort and record keeping and gives me access to every version of a file. It’s pretty easy to use and would work for pretty much any business, although non-programmers will probably need an explanation of what it does and how it works. I find that having a second computer with a backup of everything important gives me a lot of peace of mind.

The rest of my publishing workflow involves using Apache on Linux as my webserver, MySQL for the story submissions database, OpenOffice.org for reading and editing stories, Scribus for layout, and The GIMP for image editing, though I do on occasion turn to Photoshop or PixelSwapper for other image manipulation tasks - but nothing The GIMP can’t do. The only thing that I would need to do to go fully open source would be to switch to Linux as my operating system. Since the whole publishing process uses open source software that runs on both Windows and Linux, this would be pretty easy.