• On 16 January, they charged me 119.40 USD at a rate of 1.459 USD per EUR, which is 81.85 EUR.
• They refunded me the same amount on 18 January at 1.447 USD per EUR, which is 82.51 EUR.

So, I’ve made a net profit of 0.66 EUR or 0.96 USD! That’s 0.8%. Well, it’s not much of course, but who knows? It might be the start of a small fortune =)

How do I regard DreamHost after this two million dollar mistake? Rather positively, I think. Of course, I wasn’t one of those people who got in financial problems, but I do appreciate their open and honest way of dealing with it. Maybe a little too open, if you read their first blog post. At least, they didn’t try to cover it up, and are willing to compensate everyone who got overcharges beyond the actual refund without whining over it. Even to refund the remaining of your contract if you decide to leave because of this. Are they going to loose money? Are they going to loose customers? Sure thing, but perhaps this way, it’s going to save their face on the long run.

The BNR Metal Pages is some sort of encyclopedia of metal bands. I’ve been using it seens ages to look up lineups – present and past – and released albums. Thanks to the yearly top tens and the author’s commentaries you often also get a fairly good view of what records to buy as an introduction to a band.

To ease access to the pages, I’ve made a search plugin for both Firefox and IE7, and other browers that support the OpenSearch search engine specification. It sits right there in the corner where you find that search field for Google or Live Search, as an alternative engine to select. It’s like some sort of intelligent bookmark. To use the plugin, you select the BNR Metal Pages search engine from the drop down box, enter the keywords and hit return.

To install the plugin, you can either use a direct install within the browser, or download the file first and install it manually (if you know how =). I also have given the plugin to the owner of the site who’s glad to try it out himself.

Share and Enjoy!

One thing was still wrong in my perfect Thunderbird/GMail setup: the Trash folder. The default location of the trash folder in Thunberbird is not the same as GMail’s. So, if you want things to work seamlessly, you also need to remap that one. For this one, there are no user-friendly settings you can tweak though. You need a bit of hardcore config editing:

1. Go to Tools > Options and click on Config Editor on the General tab.
2. Find a key of the form mail.server.serverN.hostname with the value imap.gmail.com.
3. Create a new key mail.server.serverN.trash_folder_name and give it the value [Google Mail]/Deleted Items [Google Mail]/Bin.
4. Restart Thunderbird
5. …
6. profit

update 12 January 2008: Apparently, Google has changed the name of the trash folder from Deleted Items to Bin …

First, I simply followed Google’s instructions to configure my Thunderbird client, save for the SMTP server as I’m using a local one. I didn’t need to enable IMAP on my GMail account, it seemed to work immediately. I wouldn’t have been able to do it if I wanted anyway, as that IMAP option is still missing in my settings pages. I did have POP enabled though, perhaps that’s just as good.

After adding the new account, I’ve tweaked some of the settings that I believe are crucial for a perfect GMail IMAP experience:

• 

  Set the Sent and Drafts folder to the correct GMail folders. This way, whenever you send or save an e-mail, it will also show up as intended in the GMail webclient. And this is by far the best reason to access GMail by IMAP: the e-mails you’ve sent from Thunderbird will also show up in the chain of replies. With POP3, the sent mails from Thunderbird didn’t make it to your GMail account, disrupting the valued conversations.

• I also disabled Thunderbird’s Junk control on the GMail account, as Google seems to do a far better job at filtering junk than my Thunderbird filters.

Share and Enjoy!