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After my issues with my pc yesterday… still not sure how the inbox returned.  I had actually looked at the inbox files that Thunderbird uses and there was no sign of any of my e-mails in any of them yesterday.  So there’s no way that Symmantec’s antivirus program could have detected any virus in them today and hence tried to quarantine it… and its even more impossible that it could have somehow quarantined the OLD version of the inbox.  But anyway enough of that trauma.

Aubrey suggested in a comment to the blog that I should just use GMail for my spam filtering…  Its a cool idea, so I tried it out.  But there’s one problem.  On my work PC I have it setup so that it downloads the mail but doesn’t delete it, and then at home my PC downloads the mail and only deletes mails that are more than than 7 days old.  That way I’ll always have all my e-mails at both my work and my home.  The problem is this… GMail seems to  delete the mails as soon as you’ve downloaded them – well, it can keep a copy in your GMail account (or it can archive them or trash them).  But even though I have my GMail account setup to keep it in my inbox and my Thunderbird is setup to leave the mails on the server the messages still disappear from the gmail POP3 server.  So its a “read once” type system, which doesn’t work so well for me.  The one cool thing is that GMail really filters spam well.

So until I find a better solution, I have my e-mail accounts keeping one copy and forwarding another copy to a GMail account.  At work I collect mail directly from my mail server, and at home I collect the mail from GMail… At least this way I will have a permanent history of all my mails (on my GMail account), I’ll get my mails both at home and work and I’ll no longer be downloading the spam at both work and home (GMail will remove the spam before I download it at home).

I’ll keep trying to see if I can make GMail keep a copy on the POP3 side until my mail app asks it to remove it, and I’ll update this if I find any solutions.

Oh… I almost forgot to say that the POP3 access to GMail is pretty fast – I’ve had slower downloads off local mail servers.  So that’s pretty cool too.

Yup… Thunderbird just “lost” my entire inbox.  I know that sometimes Symmantec Antivirus used to find a virus in my inbox and it would quarantine the entire inbox file and I would say “bye bye inbox” until I got Symmantec to un-quarantine the file – it hasn’t done that for ages though, it now scans the mails as I’m downloading them so it removes the virii before they even reach my mailbox.  But today my inbox went missing.  Symmantec’s logs say it did nothing to it, the event log on my PC says that nothing happened to it.  But my Inbox file is now 0bytes in size.

I use Thunderbird because of its cool bayesian junk mail filtering, but I think I’d rather deal with junk mail manually than run the risk of losing my entire inbox again.  (And thanks to the fact that I’ve not had a working pc at home for about 3 months I don’t have copies of the mails at home – usually I’d at least have the mails at both home and at work.)

So now I think I’m going to go back to using Outlook Express.  I got a copy of Outlook 2002 with my i-Mate, but I can’t seem to get it to get setup so that each of my 3 mail accounts has its mail delivered to a different inbox.  I don’t want to mix my personal mails with website related stuff and my wife’s mails…  I want them separate.  I can do that in Outlook Express and with Thunderbird but for some reason I couldn’t seem to get Outlook 2002 to do it.

Anyway, if you know of any good anti-spam products that would work for Outlook Express please let me know. 🙂

[Update: I switched on my PC this morning and Symmantec popped up a message to say that it had just quarantined my Inbox. (Its logged date for the quarantine was around 9am on the 22nd of June 2005.)  So I told it to un-quarantine it, and lo and behold when I opened up Thunderbird all my mails were back!  I have no idea how they managed to disappear yesterday and reappear today or how Symmantec managed to quarantine a copy of my mailbox this morning that didn’t exist yesterday. Anyway, its back… Yay]

I got an e-mail from LeafWireless the other day because I’d entered a competition of theirs.  Basically it told me that they’re giving a 50% discount on their normal retail price for SD and MiniSD memory cards to people who bought iMate phones in SA from any of their resellers (valid until the end of July 2005).  So if you got your phone in SA (I got mine for free on contract from Nashua Mobile) then you can score… Here’s the prices they sent (they include VAT):

If you’re interested in buying them, their terms and conditions are:
The offer is limited to one SD memory card per handset (IMEI number required).
The offer is valid between the following dates: 01 June 2005 to 31 July 2005.
The handset must have been purchased in South Africa from an authorised i-mate(TM) dealer.

And you can contact anyone in sales on +27 11 326 1844. (The e-mail said you should talk to Melanie, but I spoke to Domanique(?) and Kirsti(?) – not sure how to spell either of their names, but they were both really helpful)