And if you go to the security section in chrome and check the slashdot cert you see "and an obsolete cipher (AES_256_CBC with HMAC-SHA1)" ! So slashdot should really update to a better than sha1 certificate to be really secure!

Firefox was once really innovative, and alongside the browser the Thunderbird mail client was a rising star - and it is still the case that Thunderbird is well utilised as probably the most comprehensive mail client that has more extensive functionality than any other existing MUA. What other mail client can deal with html mail, calendar sync, imap and have a pretty clean gui, and run on all the main computer operating systems, even if there are perhaps still too many unfixed bugs? Chrome is the preferred browser for both Windows and Linux users for many users, even though there remains a core of Windows users who for various reasons never moved away from I.E.! If Mozilla continues to wither, and Thunderbird then withers with the decline in the browser, it would be so nice if Google would build a Chrome-related email client that had as much functionality as Thunderbird but based on modern build tools, with efficient libraries! Anyone else have similar thoughts?

Yes it takes a little bit of reading and understanding and some manual command line work to get arch installed and running - and occasional manual intervention (well documented) to keep it up to date - but it is a lovely distro - I have moved to it this year from others - and being both rolling as well as cutting edge and largely pretty stable I am very happy with it. Zero effort distros are fine for cutting teeth on - which works for many - but some percentage of the linux users will want to get their computer doing things the way they like it and not the way someone else thinks they should like it! So it is horses for courses - and each user can make the system do what they want it to do.... I will be interested to see the reviews about E17 and how it works for users who install it - in a number of different distros!

You posted what I was about to say in much the same way - an old idea from decades ago when all manner of weird and quirky ideas was bandied about from solar panels in orbit many miles square beaming microwave energy back to a receiver on earth (except any living thing in its path would be fried!), to shipping Antarctic icebergs to the desserts for water, to the captured vortex idea driven by a huge bonfire in the middle of the circular building with angled entrance ducts as in the reference for this article. Great fun on the same day that the world didn't end after all!

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/blog/dr_agon-365450/which-mua-for-linux-35190/

Have a look at the mozilla bug pages - there are plenty and many never get fixed

HTML email has a function for passing data tables and not just to change the appearance of the email. In a corporate environment replying to html mail and altering a table you have received to pass on an edited table is a standard requirement. If you are sending mail to a person who has vision problems then changing fonts and colours can be very valuable too - so there can be very good reasons to compose html mail.

I am looking forward to using kmail again - currently I can't import my s/mime certificate because of a bug in gpgsm but that has a fix that will be available to me in a few days and then I can check it out for signed/encrypted email. Yes the combination kontact/kmail I used to use in KDE when it was version 3 but since the initial move to KDE4 I abandoned KDE until about a year ago when KDE4 became usable again - with KDE 4.8 and later it is my favourite Desktop Environment and with the latest KDE 4.9 stability release it is generally working very well - hopefully with the release of KDE 4.10 Kontact/Kmail will be workable and your comments above are encouraging.

One other thing that Thunderbird is bad at is handling large numbers of emails in a folder - it uses mbox for internal storage which is inefficient in the extreme when very large amounts of mail have to be handled - there has been some token effort to find a thunderbird-specific form of maildir that was being coded but it never got to the mainstream and is not in any current version as far as I know - maybe the casual user doesn't know or doesn't care about this - but if you have used Thunderbird to handle large volumes of mail in a folder you will have seen the problems that arise.

Have you tried composing an html mail in Thunderbird? - and changing the font in the compose window? - it often produces a real mess with unwanted incorrect fonts. That bug has been around for many years and never got fixed. Thunderbird is currently the best on offer but it is not perfect and quite a lot of bugs remain that will likely never get fixed.