The last OSX Leopard security update was issued roughly around 2012. Whereas the last update of TenFourBird was 2016. TenFourBird used a changesets of TenFourFox and that includes the necessary security updates released in 2016 for the copy of TFB. Mail in Leopard used an old method of communicating with the servers and that's why it didn't work all the time for you until you copied the settings from TFB to make it work. TFB implementation was somewhat current to mitigate these issues and it is the latest app available for email exchange as of 2016.
The internet we know today isn't as friendly and nice to people with older less secured apps and connections as we had when Leopard was mainstream back in the days. Using the latest available PPC email and browser apps would be the most prudent thing to do being on the internet in 2021.
Thanks for elaborating. That's a valid point, and indeed not a subjective opinion but one of these things that's a fact for all. The iMac being 18 years old as I'm typing this, at no point have I assumed it to be as secure as modern computers; I mostly put it online temporarily to listen to online radio streams or to access files in a local network, and now I added the e-mail. I don't even surf because it's so much easier to do the surfing on the main computer and if I need to download something, transfer those to the iMac from there. It was always clear to me with the e-mail that I would not use it for anything very personal or private, and in fact, I wasn't even planning on communicating with other people; Initially I thought that I might simply add the e-mail as yet another channel for transferring stuff between the computers, and to subscribe to some newsletters or feeds. On my main computer, I
never read those e-mails because they always come at a time when I don't have time for that. But I realized that on the iMac, I'm already in that exceptional space where I go on my free time, and I'll be far more receptive to reading content like that.
But I have still wondered –
because everything in a PPC is old anyway – how safe are they to bring online in general? I have a vague understanding that some attacks target certain systems (because they have a certain vulnerability), but now there's two scenarios I can think of: A PPC could either fall under a
wide category of systems that lack some security feature X, therefore it could be a potential target of an attack. Or, it could fall under a
now smaller category of systems that are so uncommon that it's not effective to fashion attacks on them, which would make these machines
safer than machines that are "just a bit outdated but not so ancient that nobody would care". And I'm talking about all kinds of attacks in general, not jut the security of e-mail.
I just published a guide for
using Mail.app on Snow Leopard on the Snow Leopard forum.
Yeah, I just got it work! But thanks anyway, I think it's always useful to chime in on threads because this thread isn't just for me alone, but also for anyone who might be reading this topic later on. Forums can be a painful mosaic to find relevant information from, and bringing several solutions together saves time for the next reader.
I personally probably wouldn't have dared to take that advice as I don't have UNIX knowledge! I agree that it's recommended to have at least some idea of what you're doing, when dealing with those levels.
Quite ironically,
this news was just out.