Dave said:
Is there a conflict between them. Friend has a new computer and outlook
depressed will not go on line for him. I suggested thunder bird, but his
wife has said that there is an incompatibility problem between the two.
Dave
With backups, you can test any theory you want
The very first thing to teach a user, is how to make backups. With
a good backup strategy, you can make as many mistakes as you want.
Any time you have "doubts" about how some computer procedure is
going to work out, a good backup strategy can fix it for you.
I don't see a reason for Thunderbird to conflict with anything. And
if the new computer has a 64 bit OS, it does have the ability to run
either 64 bit or 32 bit programs. The only thing Windows 7 64 bit version
lacks, is the ability to run older 16 bit programs (like, from ten years
ago).
If you're trying to *import* messages from one mail tool to another,
that's a different set of problems. Some schemes, rely on interprocess
communications, to "pull" messages one at a time, from one program to
the other. That would not be necessary, if the importing program could
just "read" the database the other program has created. Or, if the
original program could "export" in a standard way, so that another
program could "import" the resulting data, that would be another
way to do it. I know, when we did an email transition at work,
which involved a lot of this stuff, it took *months* of testing
to ensure the transition would go smoothly. Each user was responsible
for their own importing, but I'm sure the IT staff tested the tools
on the various representations of mail first, to make sure it works.
(They would have access to all backup images of computers, so they
could in fact test that importing worked with anyone's database content.)
I didn't have any users with problems in my department when we
went through it. But based on threads discussing this stuff in
the past, it requires great care to avoid collateral damage.
I remember one fellow employee, who had a mail database that
had never been tidied. He complained that his "mail was slow"
and "could I take a look". It appeared nobody had explained
the importance of tiding to remove deleted messages, and
the database in that case, had around 5000 untidied messages
(messages deleted but not physically removed from the database).
It's that kind of user, where you'd expect other kinds of
email maintenance, to be problematic. If there is any malformation
in a mess like that, just about anything could happen... That
particular proprietary email tool, relied on the user issuing
the "tidy" command, to trim the database. There was no automated
feature to trigger a cleanup automatically (to leave more
possibilities for "undelete"). The email tool in that case,
was written in-house, and was the one being eliminated.
Paul
