News and Reviews > Best E-mail Client

ASRT 5/14/05 - EMAIL CLIENT

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Sentinel:
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:.
-Jibz (May 09, 2005, 03:00 PM)
--- End quote ---

Jibz, that is horrible!  :-[

I'm still gonna give it a go though.  Thanks!

Mouser, if you've ever had to deal with Qualcomm support you'll see why nobody uses Eudora any more.  ;)

zridling:
Here's some thoughts by Scot Finnie that have proved true to my experience:

Thunderbird Is No Firefox
A lot of you have been bending my ear with the suggestion that I try Mozilla's Thunderbird. I don't really make a habit of reviewing email software, even though I do write about the subject a lot. Why don't I review email products? Because I've learned over the years that my needs are a lot more demanding than most people's.

For example, I need an email program whose message rules can filter both incoming and outgoing messages. Thunderbird can only filter incoming messages. I need an email app that can pull dozens of email accounts into a single inbox and folder hierarchy. Thunderbird is primarily designed to handle multiple accounts in separate inboxes. It has a feature that allows it to merge those accounts into a single inbox, but Mozilla decided to protect us from ourselves by creating a default SMTP server that's designed to serve all of your accounts, and that frankly turns the whole program into a giant mess for experienced email users who are able to work with multiple SMTP servers. I also need an email program that provides true individual account controls (plus an "identities" or "personalities" feature, which lets you create multiple account-like entries for a single mail account). Thunderbird makes a stab at this, but it's fatally flawed, primarily because of the compromises already mentioned.

One other pet peeve. Many of Thunderbird's settings dialogs are modal. Once opened, they prevent anything else from being opened. That can be annoying when you want to copy and paste settings from one account to another, for example. I also had trouble getting ThunderBird's import tool to import the Eudora address book, even though it offered an option to do so. My Eudora installation uses the default locations for all Eudora files, but Qualcomm made a change a couple of years back on those defaults. My guess is that some Thunderbird developer was using an old version of Eudora when writing the import script.

After just 30 minutes with the finished product, my assessment is this: Thunderbird looks a lot like Outlook Express. In fact, it reminds me of a cross between the cult-favorite Calypso emailer from the 1990s (which is now being marketed and developed by Rose City Software as Courier) and Outlook Express. It's actually less powerful than Outlook Express (though OE has other severe problems) and more powerful than the original Calypso.

Frankly, all, you can do better than this. There's a product called PocoMail that might be worth a look if you haven't tried it. It has much of the power of Eudora with a cleaner interface more like Outlook Express. My only qualm about PocoMail has been that the product is updated sporadically, and reliability hasn't always been excellent.

Sorry to pour cold water on Thunderbird when I know so many of you are newly fond of it. The interface is very slick but I do not like Mozilla's underlying strategy. The very same approach is perfect for the Firefox browser. But the world doesn't need another light-weight email package — there are already far too many of them. What we need is something that can go up against Outlook, Outlook Express, and Eudora head on. Something with significant features that will give us a real alternative. It's clear to me that Mozilla is more than capable of creating such an email application. They just went in a different direction. As a result, I find Thunderbird to be a bitter disappointment.

For its excellent filtering abilities, I just use GMail these days, and if I must use a POP3 client, I use PocoMail. I love FoxMail for its sheer simplicity and easy setup.

Jibz:
I found the user interface of PocoMail to be crowded and somewhat messy :redface:.

Thunderbird can be a bit slow on old machines due to the GUI stuff, like Mozilla.

I like that The Bat! and Thunderbird are not using the MS HTML control to show HTML messages .. fewer security problems :Thmbsup:.

Don't know what PocoMail is using.

Scott:
PocoMail 3 doesn't look crowded or messy to me.  I think it just takes getting used to, because it has a lot of features that bare-bones clients like Thunderbird don't.  A lot of it can be disabled, too.

PocoMail uses its own HTML engine, and doesn't support JavaScript at all.

Jibz:
It's of course a question of personal taste :up:.

What I wasn't so happy about at first glance were things like:


* focus following mouse, and highlighting selected item in each part of the windows when entered -- I find it distracting
* inconsistent coloring of the close icon (red in mailbox tree and address book, blue on message list, and on the left instead of on the right
* doulbe-sized buttons on all dialogs (since there are more than enough tiny little buttons, it can't be for accesibility reasons)
* Some buttons have tooltips (bar above message), some buttons show info at the bottom (inside message), others have no help at all (toolbar)
I'm sure it has tons of nice features though .. I was just describing my first impression :Thmbsup:.

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