News and Reviews > Best E-mail Client

ASRT 5/14/05 - EMAIL CLIENT

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mouser:
Well..

I have to tell you that this one scares me a bit, but i'm thinking we should do email clients next week.

I know this one is bound to be controversial, and I'm not looking forward to it, but it seems like something that would be useful.

I could really use some help with this one, in identifying features and requirements to look at.

Let me give you my personal bias; i would really appreciate counter-arguments and as much detailed opinion and facts from people who have some experience with different email clients.

I have been using TheBat for many years now, and i'm a real fan. I have found their beta releases to be quite buggy, but the final versions have been wonderfully reliable.  I've never lost a single email, and i have over 60,000 emails dating back to 1996 which thebat handles perfectly (very nice import function).  I also really love the way it handles multiple accounts, which i have lots of.

As i see it, the two main competitors to the bat are Outlook (express) and the new thunderbird, which has tons of fans.

Thunderbird is sure to win excellence in open source no matter what, its incredible how substantial its become in such a short time.

But i have very little experience with thunderbird and outlook (+outlook express), and i really really could use some help from people who use these seriously and know the feature set, especially people who have used these and thebat.

as much help as you can give in terms of discussing issues, etc, would be welcome.

No matter what, this is bound to be a controversial review - people have strong attachments to their email clients, especially since they are used throughout the day by most people.

So, regardless of which program ultimately wins the best-in-class award, we will want to do justice to the others and properly talk about their advantages and disadvantages.

If someone has experience with all of these programs and would be willing to write a lengthy advocacy of one of these programs, i think this would be a good time to include such opinions in the review itself.  but only if you've seriously checked out more than one of these clients or switched from one to the other, and feel qualified to speak on why you switched, etc.

I'd also appreciate links to other reviews so we can see what aspects people liked/didnt like. and lists of features which are important to you.

i could really use your help on this review, so please give me as much info/details as you can.

Sentinel:
I'm still using Eudora http://www.eudora.com as it has excellent mail filtering, decent protection against viruses & phishing attacks, the best 3rd party spam blocking around http://www.spamnix.com and the single most important feature that no other mail package seems to have - editing of incoming mail.  I often like to edit incoming mail to add extra information or highlight a key area (such as a serial number) so it is easy to find in future.

If it wasn't for the editing I probably would have changed to 'The Bat!' ages ago as Eudora updates are expensive and startup is sloooowww if you have thousands of messages.

Scott:
This post won't be very helpful, I'm afraid...  But to give you another alternative that may be worth including in the review, consider PocoMail 3.

I have been using PocoMail 3 for a long time, and it is a very well-featured client, with an emphasis on security and total separation from the lousy MSIE engine.  Native support for scripting (i.e. "PocoScripts") is a very nice touch as well (though the script language is quite limited).

PocoMail also has some minor-but-annoying bugs, some of which I've been waiting months and months to be resolved.

I really don't care how PocoMail fares in the review, though.  I've nearly abandoned it recently, because I'm sick of taking the time to submit bug reports that seemingly go ignored.

I am glad that mouser is price-agnostic though.  A lot of people would blindly go with Thunderbird, because of god's unwritten law that OS must always get the limelight.

Jibz:
You can edit received message with a little hack in The Bat!

If you move a message from the Inbox to the Outbox, you can double click it to open it in the editor and put it back in the outbox when you're done editing. Then move it back to the Inbox again.

It does seem to change the dates in the headers though, but that's the price for a hack I guess :mrgreen:.

kfitting:
Just switched over to M2 bundled with Opera.  The whole database concept beats any other email program I have used hands down!  I have used Pegasus Email (very nice... lots of config) and Outlook (only at work!!)  and M2 is cleaner and more powerful than those two, though it has a tad less configurability it seems.  My choice: M2.

Kevin

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