I’ve been having what you might call ‘mail’ problems.

For almost as long as I can remember, I’ve used Netscape/Mozilla for mail. The only time I haven’t done so was when my very first internet account was with Compuserve, who at the time didn’t support any open standards like POP3. I started using Netscape Communicator for mail and have always done so since – simply because it does what I need and I like it. Today, however, there were a considerable number of hours during which I did not like it. Not one little bit. I just wanted mail and Mozilla wouldn’t let me have it.

I’ve been seeing an odd problem with Mozilla Mail for the last version or two. On occasion, when navigating around a mail folder or news group, Mozilla gets its knickers in a twist and starts scrolling the active panel upwards. Any panel I click on then inherits the scroll – the only way out is to force-quit. This has the side effect of leaving all the mail files locked, and requires a system restart to be able to relaunch Mozilla. This is normally the only reason I need to restart my main workstation, which otherwise runs 24/7.

This is what happened to me last night, just as I was attempting to email my completed chapter to my publishers. Ugh. So I shut everything down (groan), restarted XP and opened up Moz. It was at this point that my CPU spun up to 100% usage, and Moz started eating about 2Mb of system memory per second. Hmm, not good thinks I. I force-quit Moz again and restart XP for good measure. No dice. So I send my chapter using my ISP’s web mail, and go to bed.

Today I am unable to make any progress. My first thought was that some preference file or something somewhere had got corrupted. I have been using Moz 1.4 so far, so I downloaded 1.5 RC2 and installed over the top in the hope that it would fix whatever was broken. No such luck. All my preferences were carried over to the new install, which was also broken, further reinforcing the idea that it might be a screwed up prefs file.

My next thought was that I needed to somehow throw away all traces of preference in order to start afresh. Why don’t I – I say to myself – export all my mail, create a new profile and then import the mail into it. Brilliant! Except Mozilla has no Export, and the only Import it has is from other mail programs. Argh! Why-o-why-o-why after all this time does Moz not have simple Import/Export? Ugh. So I shall do by hand, thinks I. So I created a new profile, added my mail accounts to it, quit Moz, and then very carefully copied across just the bare mail files into the new profile. Anything that looked like it might contain any sort of settings or preferences got left behind – I just wanted raw mail.

After approximately three hours of fannying around with the wretched beast, I have at last got it working. I have new mail. Wretched thing. Idiotic, no-good excuse for a mail client. Grrrr.

(I love it really).

(no, really).