A recent upgrade of Hotmail prevented me from sending new mails with Firefox 3 on Ubuntu. I could hit “reply” but it was impossible to edit the body of the e-mail. The editor just remained disabled.

The solution to this is fairly simple. Open Firefox, type in “about:config” in the addressbar and look for the setting “general.useragent.vendor“. On my Ubuntu machine this was set to “Ubuntu”. If you change this to “Firefox”, quit Firefox and restart it then you should be able to compose new e-mails in Hotmail.

On the other hand you might also consider using a reliable free mail provider.

I’ve been using courier-imap for a couple of years now. I prefer to install courier-imap on OpenBSD as it is very stable, secure, fast and low maintenance.

Unfortunately, hardware failures however can’t be solved by OpenBSD. In the last two weeks I had two clients that had a broken hard drive in their mailserver. Because these environments were relatively small they choose to use a ‘regular’ desktop instead of a decent server with RAID. Setting up a new machine and reconfiguring it takes a couple of hours. In the mean while their employees don’t have access to their e-mail.

An easy and quick ‘access’ is to restore your backuped maildirs to a shared folder. Then use Evolution (yes, they are running Linux on their desktops) to access the maildirs. In Evolution you can add a server type ‘Maildir-format mail directories’. By using this you can access your mail just like as it was sitting on a central mailserver. It’s not ideal because ‘Sent mails’ for example can end up in the wrong place … but it is a quick fix.