Laura Seabrook's Ramblings

I've been regularly getting emails from people using Grouply and it's starting to annoy me.

The homepage for Grouply says that it "consolidates all of the email messages and information from your online groups in one place. Automatically. You can choose to receive all your group updates via a single daily email message or you can access it via the Grouply website." What the fuck is the point of that?! I prefer to use an e-mail client that sits on my PC at home. I do not like to go to be-all sites that seem to be portals for other stuff.

But the real problem here is that it seems to be a sneaky form of identity theft and spam. The sign up page asks you for your Yahoo ID and Password. Huh?! as a page in the SNOPES Forums put it: There is no guarantee that this information that Grouply is aggregating is secure, thus leaving your sign-in info available to spammers and hackers--including all of our list files and photos. There's a Yahoo Answers Page about this called What is "grouply" and is it identity theft? and is well worth reading.

In future I'm just going to send a "boilerplate" reply to Grouply requests saying "PLEASE DON'T SPAM ME" and add their address to my spam filters.

After I discovered (by accident) that there was a Windows version of Evolution (which normally runs under Linux), I installed a copy and tried it out.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that it had two features that Thunderbird lacks, and that I sorely missed since migrating from The Bat!:

• Categories
  You can clump contacts together by one or more categories; and
• Outgoing Filters
  You can do things to not just incoming messages, but outgoing ones as well!

Thunderbird is only as good as the extensions one adds to it, and I have found it extremely annoying that the address book is pretty basic, and that I can't sort my outgoing e-m,ails where I want automatically. Mind you, that said, I probably wont swap over to Evolution, because unlike Thunderbird, there's no or little documentation and/or support.

I'd be very happy if someone created add-ons for the above. The only other thing I really miss from The Bat! is proper templates with "macros" (where one can substitute variables and text) that you could use in filters and so on.

But, Thunderbird plods on. I just don't understand what the problem is.