To The Edge

A couple of days back, the main hard drive gave out on my old PowerMac G5 I’ve been using as my email, correspondence, and accounting machine. Worse news was to come: the diagnostics said the main hard drive was toast, but they were none too sanguine about the state of the backup disk.

You need redundant backup. In depth. And yes, sometimes, even the pros get caught. I felt like an idiot. When an aging computer is acting badly, don’t reboot it: make another backup. And then do it again. It wasn’t a total disaster: the very worst case scenario only involved about a week or two of rekeying accounting records and a peeved biographer. The crucial stuff is backed up multiply and offsite.

Worse, I couldn’t find our SATA drive sled, so I've been on tenterhooks for a couple days until a new sled arrived. Fortunately, the backup is sound.

Beyond Eudora

But without the G5, we bid adieu to Eudora as an email client. That’s a bit of a blow: I’ve got an awful lot of email in Eudora, and I still like some aspects of Eudora better than mail.app.

Nevertheless, I'm going to need to shift to a modern email environment. My constraints:

• I’ve had my email address on public web sites continuously since 1984. I receive incredible amounts of spam. If it weren’t for Michael Tsai and Spam Sieve, it wouldn’t be pretty.
• I send and receive a lot of email.

If you know about Mail.app add-ons that I ought to be using, Email me.