To some extent I think blogs have become so popular with young people not because they're so new but because they often require nearly no effort to set up. (Not a new idea, but one that occurred to me just now.) In that sense, my elitist self balks at the idea of using a blog instead of just manually updating my site as is...but thinking practically, the ability to easily update is probably what keeps me doing it at all. [shrugs] I think I got past balking at having a blog early on, though, hence why I've mainly focused on just customizing and updating and maintaining the thing, rather than taking time to wonder why it even exists at all.

I found a wonderful thing last night as I was getting ready for bed, namely YahooPOPs!, a program that lets you use local mail clients like Thunderbird, Outlook, etc. (anything that supports POP3) to download Yahoo! Mail messages from free accounts, which technically don't provide POP3 support anymore. (I found the program in a list of "The 46 Best-ever Freeware Utilities," most of which I'm proud to say I use or have at least downloaded installers for.) Hence now I'm accomplishing one of my long-term goals, namely backing up my email, in a fraction of the time it would've taken me otherwise. This may well mean I can finally save my account from the 99-percent-full, brink-of-disaster status it's been hovering at for the past year or so. Thank God for SourceForge.

Setting up YahooPOPs! was a bit tedious at first, as I was attempting to use it with Outlook Express, which I hate with a fiery, burning passion and which doesn't really work. After that I tried Mozilla Mail, since I already had it installed, but it didn't work either. The YahooPOPs! help forum noted that Thunderbird works, so I finally acquiesced and downloaded the thing...and it works perfectly. Bah. (So yes, kids, I'm now using yet another Mozilla/Firefox product. It gets me wondering what they're going to do about Thunderbird's name—will they keep it avian, or make it into something fox-related?)

Since then I downloaded all the emails from a smaller account to test it, as I heard reports of Yahoo! accounts being shut down temporarily after people used the program. It worked, though, and my account wasn't shut down, so I'm currently in the process of downloading 1,000 emails from my main account.

I wonder if I really have exactly 1,000 emails, though. How probable is that?

Edit: I really didn't have exactly 1,000 emails. I have 797 in my inbox and 745 in a personal folder. The value for the maximum number of emails to download, however, was set to 1,000, hence the program's attempts at downloading that many emails. Attempting to do so actually led to my Yahoo! account being suspended for about 45 minutes, as did other attempts at various times throughout the day to download 99 emails, which is supposed to be the maximum number you can download without tipping off Yahoo!'s filters to the fact that you're downloading email via POP3.

Another note: While I'm personally really bored with Bush-bashing cartoons and the like, I have to admit that their popularity has probably given opportunities to thousands of starving cartoonists who'd otherwise have been faced with four-plus years of drawing Gore cartoons for uninterested audiences. At least the prodigious backlash against Bush is fueling one sector of the economy, albeit a small one.

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