Category: Techwriter
In light of recent news that Mozilla has stopped development of Thunderbird and Microsoft has expressed that some Windows Live products might not survive the transition to Windows 8, fans of both e-mail clients (including myself) might be somewhat disappointed by this not so coincidental turn of events. Thus, this article is not an unkind competition of blogging using Live Mail and Thunderbird but rather a quick look at the advantages of using both when e-mailing to a blog service.
Most users of Blogger.com probably use the online service's blogging platform directly to write and layout their articles. However, when you're overseas at a location that prevents access to Blogger (e.g. China), one workaround is to e-mail your blog post directly to the site - and there's no better way to do it than using Windows Live Mail in Windows and Mozilla Thunderbird in Linux.
No-nonsense Windows Live Mail
Windows Live Mail's familiar Microsoft-word user interface makes writing blogs fast and easy. Although there's a fairly well-known bug which causes Live Mail to crash when inserting images using the Insert menu, users can just open Windows Explorer and drag the image file to the document.
Thunderbird provides more options for bloggers when creating a hyperlink or inserting an image, but Windows Live Mail just lets you do it. Plus, if you clicked on the URL bar of your browser before inserting a hyperlink, the address is pasted automatically to the insert Hyperlink window.
Besides the normal formatting features found in most e-mail clients, Windows Live Mail seems to have a leg up in speed especially when sending a blog post to Blogger via your Hotmail/Live account. For some reason, although Thunderbird natively supports Gmail, Thunderbird occasionally has hiccups sending blog posts - the post gets there but Thunderbird takes awhile or just plain stops when attempting to save a copy to the drafts or sent folder (an important precaution for the serious blogger).
Some might be wondering why you should use Live Mail when Live Writer, a dedicated blogging tool from Windows Live, is available instead. Well, the short answer is that if your country is blocking Blogger.com, chances are a direct upload from Live Writer will also fail.
Options and options in Thunderbird
Live Mail is great if you're more focused on writing, but if you want a blog post with all the normal accouterments of a web page, switch to Thunderbird. Sure, you have to do a lot more work when inserting hyperlinks or images, but you're assured that everything will work well once the blog gets posted.
When inserting a hyperlink, Thunderbird prompts for the full URL (you have to type http://) while offering additional options for Javascript Events and HTML attributes.
When inserting images, Thunderbird reminds you to put an ALT text or tooltip, asks you if you want to attach the image to your e-mail (always!), and provides you plenty of options in terms of resizing or positioning the image not to mention creating a hyperlink to a different location.
Among many other features not found in Live Mail, Thunderbird also allows you to create a table of contents based on standard HTML styles.
Microsoft and Mozilla
Windows Live Mail and Thunderbird are two great e-mail clients for blogging. Live Mail is better at dashing off a quick missive to a loving audience, while Thunderbird is perfect for a carefully crafted article. Hopefully, Microsoft and Mozilla will retain some semblance of support for these applications despite the coming arrival of Windows 8 and Mozilla's plans for Firefox. As for me, I'll still be running both applications in my Windows and Linux boxes for some time to come.
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