After watching Ava use Thunderbird on her new netbook, I realised there was no reason I had to keep using the web interface when I wanted to read mail on mine. I have an ancient POP3-era habit of only setting up an email client on one machine at a time, but thanks to the wonder that is IMAP there’s no reason to keep that up. Messages will show up in as many places as I care to read them and all devices stay synchronised.

I’m not so happy with the default Thunderbird layout on this Eee pc screen, though. The fonts are clearly designed for a much larger screen, and they take up much more space than is necessary. There’s no preference setting that allows you to change the font size, but I found a curiously obscure CSS hack that makes it work. If you create a file named userChrome.css inside your Thunderbird profile directory, you can override all the factory style settings, whether they have options in the preferences box or not. Point size 9 works really well on this 1024×600 screen.