Like a lot of people out there, I use Outlook Express as my mail client. It’s not the best, but it’s free, and more importantly, I’m comfy with it. (People will stick with sub-optimal software just to keep inside their comfort zone. I hate to say it, but I’m no different.) Knowing that it’s not the most secure thing in the world, I try to keep my virus definitions and system updates current. I even staunchly resisted my former boss’s efforts to move me to Outlook - it had way too many features that I didn’t need, didn’t want, and couldn’t get rid of.

Now my big thing is plain text email. I like it. Hell, it’s the reason I’m on mailing lists instead of web based BBS’s. Text is clean, fast, and archives easily. So of course, I had my mail prefs set to only send in plain text regardless of what “rich text” gobbledygook I was replying to. I figured this was pretty good.

Then after my latest update/patch, I found a new option in the settings - “read all mail in plain text”. For roughly a month I have seen no icky html mail at all. Pure, happy text as far as my inbox can see, with a little attachment icon telling me that although some yutz wanted to send me a gussied up “rich text” note; or worse, a full flippin’ web page, I no longer have to deal with it.

Not too bad an idea - wonder how they snuck it past the marketing wanks.

Just when I think Mozilla has taken care of all my pop up woes (and it really has covered 90% of them) I’m reminded that it has yet to come up with a way to do something useful and non window spawning with “target=_blank” links. Currently, whenever I hit a new window spawning link (and if there’s a way to tell if a new window’s gonna happen before you hit the link or look at the source, *I* haven’t found it yet.) I kill the new window and ctrl+click the link to bring the page up in a new tab.

This works, but it’s kludgey. And annoying. What I’d *like* is a way to specify in the preferences (and I’d be willing to hand edit the prefs.js file to get this done) that all “target=_blank” links get opened in a new tab.

Of course, this might cause some confusion if I’m surfing a legitimately frames enabled site, but I’m willing to live with that. Yes, I hate pop ups that frigging much.