From the Author

Just a few final words before starting this book: You will see many email addresses showing in the book's figures in the domain hipson.net. These addresses were created specifically for this book and were deleted when the book was finished. Don't send email to those addresses hoping to get directly to me it won't work! Instead, you can email me at [e-mail] (or [e-mail]). I'll try to answer all emails (especially if you are nice to me). If you have suggestions about how the book could be made better, or find any mistakes, please do send them to me.

Both hipson.net and peterhipson.com are my domains. If you wish, visit them at http://www.hipson.net and http://www.peterhipson.com. All are located at my home, using an ADSL connection. The servers include five Dell PowerEdge servers, a hipson.net server, and a whole mess of workstations and notebooks. For a computer geek, it doesn't get any better than this.

We have a few conventions we are using in this book. There are notes, tips, and cautions. We've included examples of each.

Note

A note is an idea or action that affects how things work. Information in a note would need to be considered to get the effect suggested in the book's text. Notes are necessary information, but were a note's contents ignored, nothing would be lost you would simply not get the results you expected.

Tip

A tip is a suggestion that you will find makes using Firefox or Thunderbird easier. There is no reason to worry about a tip; they are just there to make things easier.

Caution

A caution is information that, if not followed, might result in incorrect operation of the product, or even loss of data. Whenever you see a caution, read and heed its advice!

Code in this book is signified using a monospaced font. Some code contains bold; in these you should read the text to determine what the bold means. Usually bold text is unique to a given user, so the example might need to be edited for your situation prior to being used.