thunderbird this is another of my world famous public service posts. i use thunderbird as my e-mail program of choice on both mac and pc. it works. and it isn't made by microsoft. but one day things went all wrong. it would hang downloading the inbox. wtf? it worked great yesterday. persistent prayers to google eventually turned up the problem. it was hanging on one particular message. fortunately, i could use a web browser to get my emails. but i get fifty zillion a day. and our webmail has no filters. inconvenient. anywho, webmail could not display the offending email. it was the one after the last one thunderbird had successfully downloaded. webmail could however delete it. thunderbird worked great after the cruft was removed. that was problem number one. problem number two was i needed to update some of my message filters. doing so i discovered something rather unusual. the internet says thunderbird's message filters are not case sensitive. that's not quite right. i believe that thunderbird converts the message text to lower case. then tests the filter. say for example, the filter is: subject starts with [SPAM]. and you get a message with the subject: [SPAM], it won't match. cause the message subject is converted to [spam] then compared to [SPAM] case sensitive. which doesn't match. pah. the solution is to make your filter: subject starts with [spam]. that will match [SPAM] [spam] [Spam} [SpAm] etc. weird ass shit that one.  ¶ 8:00 AM