Hello -
Thank you for your excellent product OpenOffice, but it is missing one critical application - email! Which I'm sure you're already aware...
EVERYTHING out there is garbage, which you also know, except for Outlook but which is plagued by virus attacks and ridiculous security holes. Thunderbird, if it wasn't for their incompetant import utility which they seem mentally gridlocked in maintaining, is the only thing that has any potential. Microsoft almost got it right with Windows Mail, but just like about everything they do took a major step backwards with the replacement Windows Live Mail.
Here are the major problems that have been going on since Win98:
1) No respect for the user data as it is buried deep down in obscure directory structure rather than where it should be:
c:\Users\UserName\eMail
2) Microsoft finally got it right by putting Contacts at c:\Users\UserName\Contacts, and keeping each contact as its own file name (like they do with Favorites, which is just about the only thing they've ever done right with user data), but blew it with the release of Windows Live Mail (idiots).
3) Microsoft also finally got it right with Windows Mail by making each box its own folder (ie. c:\Users\UserName\eMail\Inbox), and then each message saved as its own file name (ie. like they do with Favorites), but totally went back to stupid with Windows Live Mail.
4) Constantly losing your email archives because the following release can't import the data. I can't believe how stupidly this is handled. There should be now reason you can't import everything from the earliest versions of Outlook/Outlook Express/Netscape to the latest versions of Outlook/Thunderbird/Windows Live Mail. Thunderbird is retarded in this regards because you can't manually select the folder to import from. You know so if you've saved or backed up the email 'identity' folder to some other place. And you should be able to import both the native data format AND the 'exported' data format so it does not matter whether you've backed up the data by copying the entire folder structure or did an export before you were screwed out of the older version of the email software.
5) Importing varies from intelligent to retarded. Intelligent so should you accidently import from the same archived email it does not double up on the duplicate messages. Retarded is when it doesn't and then you just screwed yourself into having to manually delete 1000 emails.
6) Whatever you decide please maintain the following:
c:\Users\UserName\eMail
c:\Users\UserName\Contacts (maintaining Microsoft's current Win7 implementation)
7) And newer releases never screw you out of your archives - and can always handle multiple email accounts which Outlook Express and Thunderbird have always done okay with.
When can we expect a Mac version of OpenOffice???
Thank you for your consideration,
- Patrick Hemphill
