Good news! My fiance Elsa and I are moving forward with our plan to be married on June 24. I’ve begun the exciting process of trying to rediscover the current whereabouts of some of my oldest friends. After breaking a cell phone, breaking or losing a couple of Palm organizers, and failing to properly update my paper address book, I’ve lost track of lots of folks. My email archive doesn’t seem to be helping: I’ve aimed Thunderbird Search at it, but it’s all on an IMAP server, and searching through IMAP via Thunderbird appears to be neither easy, nor fast, nor thorough. Fortunately, between the Six-Degrees-of-Separation phenomenon and Google, I expect to be able to locate everyone.

What is the moral of this story?

• I’m never going to type my addresses into a proprietary piece of software again. It’s open source software with text-file backups for me.
• Now that near-ubiquitous Web access is a reality, I need to set up an online address book that I can access from anywhere.
• I begin to understand why so many people have switched to Gmail, which reportedly features search that actually works, in spades. Alas, my privacy concerns keep me away from Gmail. I need the open-source, private Gmail clone.