E-Mail Clients, Add-ons & Themes, Oh My!

This weekend I dedicated myself to resolving the one major bug remaining after my permanent install of Ubuntu: Evolution will receive mail but not send it.

Below the cut: My solution and discovering add-ons/themes from Mozilla.

After perusing the Ubuntu help forums, I find this is not a unique problem. Apparently, several major e-mail services recently switched authentication procedures for SMTP email servers. Unfortunately, most of them didn’t really give warning to their customers beforehand so a lot of people were left flat-footed.

Double unfortunately, that’s not the only problem with my Evolution install. I fixed the authentication error and got another error involving sending email. I couldn’t find any reference to this particular error in the Ubuntu forums. Frustrated, I decided to try Thunderbird instead. Several people had commented it was a good replacement for Evolution especially if they focus mainly on e-mail like me and not calendars, memos, etc.

Thunderbird had the exact same authentication problem but it was a LOT easier to fix thanks to this super-helpful thread in the Mozilla forums. My change consisted of expanding my email user-name to the full email address under the Edit-->Account Settings-->Outgoing Server (SMTP). That’s it. After some transferring of contacts & saving of e-mails, Thunderbird is now my e-mail client. I also installed a lovely To-Do List application. It’s simple and easy-to-use.

During this whole endeavor, I discovered Mozilla themes & add-ons for Thunderbird & Firefox. The add-ons I am a bit hesitant about. I only installed the Snap Shots and BlogRovr add-ons which I like so far.

You can also download themes to change the appearance of both Firefox and Thunderbird. And they have some good ones. I’ve got a purple-themed desktop now, so I’m now using Modern Modoki in Firefox and Outlook 2003 SilverTB in Thunderbird.
Check it out:

I installed several other themes but they don’t really go with my current desktop. I'll play around with them later.