Major annoyance: clicking on mailto links in Firefox doesn't open the email app I want to use, KMail. Another related major annoyance: going to File > Send Link in Firefox doesn't open the email app I want to use, KMail. The solution? Find your profile folder for Firefox; more than likely you'll find it at /home/[username]/.mozilla/firefox/[random-letters-n-numbers]/. In that folder, if you have a file named user.js, open it with a text editor; otherwise, create it and open it with a text editor. Add the following lines: // File > Send Link uses Kmail user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.mailto","kmailservice"); The 1st line is a comment describing what we're doing; the 2nd line performs the magic. Save & close user.js, restart Firefox, go to a web page, and choose File > Send Link. An email message using KMail should open. Ahhhhh! (And yes, I wrote a book about Firefox - Don't Click on the Blue E!: Switching to Firefox - that you might find interesting.) (Check out all ...

One of the more interesting open source projects to arise out of Novell recently is Hula, a calendar & mail server. Several clients will be supported, including Evolution (duh), KMail, Thunderbird, and even Outlook (well, especially Outlook - they want this to compete a bit with Exchange). Works with ClamAV & SpamAssassin, which is cool. The screenshots look interesting, & I can already tell that this thing is gonna have a lot more aesthetic sense that anything from MSFT ever did. Oh, and installing this thing is really easy. Super duper easy. Don't believe me? Read the installation page. Now, Hula's not 100% ready for prime time totally & completely, but it's good enough to play with, and some people are using it to do real work, so it's close. To learn more, check out the User Guide. BTW, I especially like this statement on the FAQ: "How well does it scale? Insanely well." Well, heck, that's great! (Check out all of our posts on ...

mozillaZine is reporting in a story titled Associated Press Underwhelmed by Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 that the reviewer, Anick Jesdanun, was "disappointed by the need to train the junk mail filter". I'm sorry, but Tbird has the best junk mail filters of any email program out today, and I say that as a Kmail user. It sounds like this reviewer didn't understand how Tbird's filters work, or even the concept behind them (if you want to learn more, they're called Bayesian filters, and the original idea behind them was in Paul Graham's seminal essay, A Plan for Spam). ...

If you use Kontact, or Kmail, you're using KAddressBook, the contact directory for KDE. The latest version introduced a slew of new features, including IM integration, better import & export to a wider variety of formats, and increased support for backend servers like OpenExchange, Kolab, and eGroupWare. In particular, the improved exporting capabilities made me trust it enough to begin using it as my main contact database; prior to that I was using a spreadsheet that I exported from periodically. Now that KAddressBook supports exporting to vCard, LDIF, and CSV, I feel a lot safer using it to store all my contact info for everyone I work & play with (& check out the list of formats it can import - wow!). In fact, KAddressBook pretty much wipes the floor with Evolution, who never had that good of an import/export list (if this has been fixed, pls let me know). If you wanna find out more about KAddressBook, the British KDE.org site has a nice piece - KAddressbook Overview - that you ...

If you're using KDE, open the Konqueror file manager & find a text file. Right-click on it & pay attention to the Actions menu. Go check that one out. You may have only one or two things in the Action menu, or you may have several. I have the following: Rename with KRename Sign file Encyrypt file Create Data CD with K3b Print That list is generated by KDE servicemenus. Basically, servicemenus pay attention to the file you click on, & then offer actions possible for that particular file. See what happens when you right-click on an MP3 file, an OpenOffice.org doc, or a JPG. Many of the choices in the Action submenu will be the same, but you will always get unique actions for each different file type. It's really easy to install a new servicemenu: just download it and then copy the file to this location: ~/.kde/share/apps/konqueror/servicemenus/ Let's say you download the fantastic "print openoffice ...

Well, the science of evolution might very well be thrown out (& don't get me started about that), but I doubt if the school board will go after the email program and PIM known as Novell Evolution. In the meantime, while Evolution is still safe, let's take a look at some articles about it. But if you're in Kansas, ya can't read them until all this blows over, 'k? It's no surprise that Novell's own web site has most of these articles, since Novell owns Evolution. Evolution Reviewed It's not really a review; instead, it's more of an overview of the capabilities Evolution contains, with lots of pretty screenshots. If you don't really know what Evolution does, start with this piece. Setting up an Account in Evolution OK, now that you know what Evolution does, you probably want to try it out. This brief article shows you how to set up a POP & SMTP account, a simple process, really. I use IMAP, but it's pretty much the same thing. Text-Only Email in ...