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JANUARY 2018

OPEN SOURCE FOR YOU

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Let’s Try

Apart from email, Thunderbird can also display content

from RSS feeds (as shown in Figure 4) and Usenet forums

(as shown in Figure 5).

Usenet newsgroups predate the World Wide Web. They

are like an online discussion forum organised into several

hierarchical groups. Forum participants post messages in

the form of an email addressed to a newsgroup (say comp.

lang.javascript), and the NNTP client threads the discussions

based on the subject line (Google Groups is a Web based

interface into the world of Usenet).

SeaMonkey ChatZilla

Apart from the Firefox-based browser and the Thunderbird-

based email client, SeaMonkey also bundles an IRC chat

client. IRC is yet another Internet-based communication

protocol that does not use the World Wide Web. It is the

preferred medium of communication for hackers. Here is a

link for starters: irc://chat.freenode.net/.

By: V. Subhash

The author is a writer, illustrator, programmer and FOSS fan.

His website is at www.vsubhash.com. You can contact him at

tech.writer@outlook.com.

Figure 4: Thunderbird is also an RSS feed reader

Figure 5: A newsgroup user sends an email message

Email backup

When you store email offline, the burden of doing regular

backups falls on you. You also need to ensure that your

computer is not vulnerable to malware such as email viruses.

Web mail providers do a good job of eliminating email-borne

malware, but malware can still arrive from other sources.

Windows computers are particularly vulnerable to malware

spread by USB drives and browser toolbars and extensions. In

Windows, simply creating a directory named ‘autorun.inf’ at

the root level stops most USB drive infections.

SeaMonkey stores all its data (email messages and

accounts, RSS feeds, website user names/ passwords/

preferences, etc,) in the

~/.mozilla/Seamonkey

directory.

For backup, just zip this directory regularly. If you move to

a new GNU/Linux system, restore the backed-up directory

to your new

~/.mozilla

directory.

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