AVG Free 8 and No One Is Getting My Emails

If you are using the new AVG Free 8, and you are using Thunderbird or maybe even a version of Outlook or another Email program, and no one is receiving your emails even though it looks like they are sending okay, it may be a setting in your AVG. Open AVG, double-click on Email scanner, UNcheck Scan Outgoing mail, and Save Changes.

Now you can send emails again and people will receive them.

Test things out. If people can receive your emails now, then that was the problem. If not, it is something else...

Mozilla Thunderbird 2 Is Finally Ready

Thunderbird 2 is finally available. Download here. Install it on top of the old Thunderbird (1.5...).

Some of your old extensions and themes might not work (at first). The theme I was using did not work and things looked very messed up. I switched to the new default theme and things were fine. If you use small icons on the toolbars, you may need to Customize and uncheck and then re-check Use small icons to make this work.

Release notes are here if you are interested in all the details of what is new.

The only problem I had was with my Hotmail that I had set up with 2 extensions so I could read and send Hotmail email via Thunderbird. To fix it, I had to delete my Hotmail account within Thunderbird and recreate it using the new Webmail feature in Thunderbird. If you are dealing with this situation too, make sure to include "@hotmail.com" in the user name, and for the outgoing server, use the one you were using with the old Hotmail extension set up. The new account will default to an outgoing server of: "Webmail - localhost" which is a weird combination of your regular ISP account and hotmail and this does not work. Use the hotmail - local outgoing server that you set up previously - it works.
Then, I went onto my hotmail on the web and marked everything as UNread and then re-downloaded all the messages into Thunderbird. Adjust the account settings for the newly set up Hotmail in Thunderbird to keep messages on the server.

My Gmail, that I had set up as a POP account in Thunderbird still works fine.

If you want to force some old extensions to work in the new Thunderbird, install the Mr Tech Local Install extension (Firefox and Thunderbird) and then configure it to allow the old extensions to work (this doesn't work for the old webmail/hotmail extensions though). It may not work for some extensions.

Another Thunderbird Extension

I just found another very useful Thunderbird extension: Empty Trash Toolbar Button.
Install it, restart Thunderbird, right-click on your toolbar to Customize, drage the new Trash icon up to where you want it, ok. Now, to empty the trash, just click on that button.

To empty your junk folder, there is a Delete Junk icon already in there (when you Customize the toolbar) - you can drag it up to where you want it to have a shortcut for that too.