Don’t just let your spam emails sit in your spam folder or trash. Fight back! KnujOn (think “nudge on”) is a Thunderbird extension that takes emails you mark as spam and forwards them to an organization that works to shut down spammers by contacting hosting companies and law enforcement agencies.

Right on, guys!

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/2824

Jetpack is still in it’s early stages but it holds great promise to revolutionize how we use browsers. Right now, if you have an idea for a Firefox plugin but the how-to info you found scared you away take heart. Help is on the way. Jetpack provides a much easier to use API so you can do almost anything you want using HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.

Take a look! https://jetpack.mozillalabs.com

It’s 8:48 AM Eastern time 5/18/09 and the Google News servers are having a Monday morning. 503 errors abound. This is hot on the heels of the latest major Google outage on Thursday 5/14/09 where Google blamed network routing issues.

Update #1. It’s now 9:25am and the servers are still down. If the world’s largest Internet company can’t stay up with all their billions, what hope is there for us?

Update #2. 10am ET, Google News is back up. Here’s a first report from PC Magazine.

The sudden meltdown of one of our longest surviving laptops triggered much grief and wringing of hands. What now? We’re home to computers running XP, Mac OS X, Linux, and even an old blue clamshell Mac running 9.6 so I was open to replacing the laptop with just about any operating system. But, alas, for reasons beyond my control it had to be a PC and today the only operating system I could get was Vista.

When life hands you Vista, it’s time to make lemonade.

Let’s start off with my first impressions from when I booted up the beautiful Toshiba laptop for the first time.

• I can’t find anything! Everytime I go to where I logically expect something to be it just isn’t there. Let’s see, where are the applications I can’t see in the start window? Where are the applications that aren’t in the All Programs list? They call it all programs but I guess they don’t really mean it.
• The Start window is just as bad as XP. How is that possible? Why can’t Microsoft get it through their thick skulls that this interface needs to go away? I had hoped that they were listening over the last 8 or so years and created something that made sense. Guess not. I intend to search for aftermarket interface alternatives. I will post what I find.
• Does it seem slow or is it just me? This new laptop is a dual-core T6600 2.2 GHz machine with 4 GB of RAM. You would think it would scream. Not sure what’s going on, maybe it’s just the way Vista makes everything fade in and out like they just discovered how to do it. Could it be fast and just look like a pig of an operating system?
• OMG! The screen just went black! Oh, it’s just the security feature trying to warn me that opening an application might BRING THE END OF THE FREE WORLD! Seriously, the screen goes black for just over a second while it figures out which message to show over a stylishly grayed-out background. Gotta find out how to change that. Will post that as well.

Now, what do you do after you have created your first account and tell Vista how to work like a computer?

1. Prepare to become a genius at uninstalling stuff.
2. Figure out that there is no Run command line. You TYPE COMMANDS IN THE SEARCH BOX! Huh?
3. Need to connect to a hidden wireless network? Good luck. Fortunately, I only spent 3 seconds trying to figure it out then had my Linksys software create a script on my USB pen drive. Now that’s a nice feature.

Overall, I am obviously not impressed after my first day with Vista. It might grow on me but I doubt it. Fortunately I don’t have to use it every day. I’ve got a MacBook Pro.

I found an odd thing today. In Thunderbird, my favorite open source email client, when I tried to move large numbers of emails (more than 800) from one folder to another there was a huge performance hit with one method versus another.

Trying to drag and drop 875 emails, Thunderbird took more than 3 minutes to process them. However when I tried to move the same emails but used ctrl-click (Mac not PC, remember) to choose the target folder, the emails moved in less than 20 seconds.

The difference is staggering. I am interested to know if anyone has seen this same behavior on other operating systems.

If you use Google Mail you may have noticed the Forgotten Attachment Detector on the long list of Lab extras. This feature looks for a keyword like “attached” in your email and then double checks to make sure you have actually remembered to attach something. However, I can show you how to do the same thing in Thunderbird and in t-bird it works even better.

Step 1. Grab the Check and Send add-on from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/2281.

Step 2. After you have installed it and restarted, go to Tools >> Add-ons >> Check and Send and click Preferences.

Step 3. Click on the second tab labeled “Attachments”. The wording on the add-on is a little strange so don’t bother to follow the logic. Just keep going…

Step 4. Select the first checkbox and make sure the drop-down says “appear”.

Step 5. Now type in the word or words you want it to test for that would mean there should be an attachment. If you want it to test against different words, separate them with a pipe ” | “.

Step 6. Leave the rest as it is and click “ok”.

This works so much better than Gmail’s feature because a) it actually works and b) you can select the words you really use in an email to tell someone there is an attachment.

Give it a try and let me know if you can improve on this.