Managing multiple email accounts with Thunderbird

If you are like me , then you probably have more than one email account.  And really, who doesn't these days.  You may even have more than one Gmail account, which can be hard to manage unless you have multiple sign in enabled in you Gmail settings.  But by far the easiest way to manage all of your email accounts in one place is with Thunderbird.  Thunderbird is an email client by Mozilla, the makers of Firefox.

Whether you run Windows, Mac or Linux, Thunderbird will work for you.  The newest version of T-Bird makes setting up accounts really easy.  You don't have to enter the name of your email servers anymore.  When you go to make an account, it will ask for your name, email address, and password.  Thunderbird figures out all the rest and finishes setting up you accounts.  It also has a feature called unified folders.  This  lets you view all your in-boxes, sent mail, trash, and archived mail from all your accounts together.  Of course you can still view them separately if you prefer.  Another handy feature of T-bird is the search feature.  Most other email clients have the search buried in some menu, but T-bird puts it right on the main page where it's easy to get to.  You also don't need to choose filters anymore before searching.  And, just like Firefox, Thunderbird has an extensive library of extensions if the vanilla program doesn't do everything you need it to do.  There are lots of extensions which add all sorts of functionality, including calendars, contact management, and news reading.  I use the Zindus contact sync extension to synchronize my contacts back and forth between my Gmail accounts.  This is useful when I have to log into the Gmail website from another computer, because all of my Thunderbird contacts will show up in Gmail.  Of course, these are just a few noteworthy features of Thunderbird, but there are many more.

If you are looking for a better way to read your email, try Thunderbird.   It is available here at Mozilla's website.

Catalyst 11.1 Drivers now available for ATI/AMD video cards

The long wait is finally over, as AMD has released its new Catalyst 11.1 driver.  This driver brings native Linux support for the Radeon 6xxx series.  Sadly, my card still does not seem to be recognized by the driver properly.  I will have to do some digging in order to find out what is wrong here.  The driver also offers performance improvements on Left 4 Dead 2 on the Radeon 6xxx series under Windows, although I have not been able to confirm this yet.  As soon as I get a reason to boot back into Windows, I will get some performance numbers.  Download the new driver here if you have an ATI/AMD card.