Re: OT: Eudora a good alternative to Thunderbird?

Joerg wrote:
JosephKK wrote:
Joerg notthisjoergsch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx posted to
sci.electronics.design:

John Devereux wrote:

Joerg <notthisjoergsch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:


Joerg wrote:


Hello Folks,

After the umpteenth freeze where I can't get any email to the
laptop I've had it with Thunderbird. Mozilla was good and a lot
less buggy but it ain't now more, only the huge SeaMonkey version.

Eudora now says on the site that the no-nagware version (paid) is
no longer being sold. Does this mean Eudora may be going away?

Ok guys, found it out. There was an older Norton version on there,
hasn't been update since 2006 so it hasn't changed. Beats me how
that could suddenly interfere. It had to actually be hosed off the
harddrive in its entirety, then a reboot, before Thunderbird would
work.

Good old norton - you can always rely on it to stuff up your
machine.

AV programs are incredibly intrusive. I suppose they have to be.
They probably intercept every operation on a file or network
packet.

What really irks me about them is that they are notoriously
disobedient. When you turn a firewall function off I expect it to be
OFF. It wasn't. McAfee on another PC is the same. It's going to be
outta here one of these days but first I have to find something
better. Tried out AVG but that has a rather huge footprint, slows
things down too much. Anyone know about the AOL version? Or does MS
provide something good enough?

Browsers have some similar "not so nice" traits. For example, all of
the ones I've ever used (except Mosaic!) do not offer much authority
over the STOP button. When that is pressed I expect a web transfer
to terminate this instant. Nope, don't work. Often it has to be
CTRL-ALT-DEL, works every single time. IMHO Mosaic was the best
browser ever, to this day unsurpassed in robustness and user
authority.


Personally, i prefer clam av / clamwin. It does not get in the way
much, and the up to date properties is very good. If you don't mind
doing a little manual scheduling, it can be very nice. It only scans
what and when you tell it to. But the detect and cleanup rate is
better than norton or macafee.


However, AFAIK it doesn't monitor inbound web traffic so you've got to keep a firewall in addition. I just learned from Dell that the Windows version may be useless in a network situation. Turn it on and you can't see any server or other PC. Oh man, it seems it can't even discern between a legitimately requested transfer _by_ the PC on which it resides versus an outside request.


Anti-virus scanning and firewalling are two totally different concepts - Norton and other commercial "internet security" tools mix them up, thus confusing users and resellers (like Dell, or ISPs).

First off, an anti-virus scanner checks files for viruses (or other malware - although for some reason the commercial scanners often ignore trojans and spyware). There is no point in doing on-access scanning of files on your machine - that's a hideous waste of resources. You want to ensure scanning of files coming onto the machine - email is the most important there. But any decent email provider will already scan your incoming emails - you don't need your own scanner unless you are handling your own email serving (or don't trust your ISP!). Automatic scanning of downloaded files from the internet could be nice, but not many security products do it well. It's also not essential for security - after all, you (should!) know what sort of sites you are looking at, and as long as you don't use the security sieve known as IE, you'll not run any downloaded programs unless you actively choose to do so.

Firewalling is about limiting traffic into or out of a PC or network. Far and away the biggest risk is incoming traffic - and no amount of software on a windows machine will firewall that properly. Software firewalls on windows (whether the one that comes with windows, or a third-party tool) are like Japanese paper walls - they look like they keep out the nasties, but are not hard to break through. The only way to keep windows machines safe is to have a hardware firewall between the internet and the PC's. The cheapest $20 NAT router is good enough, and far better than any software you can get for windows (for *nix, it's a different matter - it is a simple matter to make a safe firewall on the *nix machine).


Now I wish there was another browser of the quality level of Mosaic where a hanging or rogue transfer from a web site can be stopped using, duh!, the STOP button instead of CRTL-ALT-DEL.


The only way I manage to get Firefox to stop is with pdf files through the Acrobat plugin - killing the acrobat.exe process frees Firefox again.
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