Being a fan of Firefox I gave Mozilla’s Thunderbird a try today. Granted, it’s a lot lighter than Outlook (currently using 2007), but… perhaps it’s too light. Yes, there are plug-ins to augment functionality and features, but..

Perhaps the biggest thing that bugged me about it was the lack of an option to set images from all remote sites to load by default. I realize it’s perhaps not a "safe" thing to do, or that it might increase the amount of spam, but the fact that I always have to click on "Load Images" to load the embedded images slows down processing emails. Emails arrive from so many domains/senders that setting a specific sites on the image-loading-whitelist doesn’t cut it.

I’ll give it another try later.. and if I happen to have missed a setting to set remote images to load by default (I couldn’t find anything on the topic by quick Googling, either), please write a comment.

I’ve been meaning to try out SkypeOut as a possible even less expensive replacement for our current VOIP service, and when a IOGear GBU321 USB-to-Bluetooth dongle arrived today, I paired it with my cell phone’s Plantronics Discovery 655 headset, and gave SkypeOut a try. Basically, that (three months of SkypeOut service) was waste of eight or so dollars. The call quality is so terrible that even if the poor call quality is an “occasional” occurrence, the service is not useable for anything but testing it as a hobby, or for curiosity’s sake (sort of like a HAM radio).

I’m on Comcast cable ISP with speedtest.net giving 6240kb/s downstream and 484kb/s upstream; at the time of the SkypeOut test there was negligible network traffic, and no other major apps open on my PC. I also made a recording test from my bluetooth headset using Sound Forge to make sure the bluetooth link wasn’t at fault (it wasn’t – the recording sounded like a very clear PSTN call). Apparently, I’m not the only person who doesn’t find SkypeOut call quality satisfactory.

So I continue to use VoipYourLife. I initially switched from POTS to Vonage, but after Vonage quietly raised their rate to Finland last summer from 4¢/min to 27¢/min (it took 2½ months after the rate increase before I happened to glance the automatically charged phone bill and thus notice the almost 7x rate hike), I switched to VoipYourLife and it has worked fairly well. While perhaps not worth “ten stars”, VoipYourLife has been at least as good call quality-wise as Vonage and their customer service is considerably better than that of Vonage’s (which of course doesn’t say much .. but they are actually quite responsive), so they’re probably about as consumer good as VOIP services go (corporate VOIP services aren’t trouble-free, either). But considering that the monthly fee is about 1/3 of equivalent AT&T service — and I can dial overseas calls directly at a reasonable cost without having to resort to the “prefix” calling services, I think it’s worth it.

Finally a word for those who found this post while searching info about IOGear GBU321 and/or/with Plantronics Discovery 655. They seem to work well together; IOGear driver installation got stuck on the first run, but my PC was having some issues, and rebooting and reinstalling the driver fixed the problem. Pairing with Discovery 655 was easy once I found the manual as the pass code, “0000″, was needed to complete pairing. The range is not very long, but it was to be expected. The quality starts to degrade after about 30 feet, just like it does with a cell phone. But while sitting at the computer, or while moving around in the same room, the connection quality is very good. The driver disk that came with the bluetooth dongle was out of date (or at least a new version several versions ahead was available from the IOGear website).