ASRT 5/14/05 - EMAIL CLIENT

[Jibz]

BTW, regarding a border/color change caused by hot tracking in PocoMail; I see only one, and in the preview pane, and it's minimal (it's 1 pixel wide!).  I assume they do it there because otherwise, there would be no indication that the preview pane had focus.

-Scott

Here I have a color change on the background of the selected item in the mailbox list and message list as well.

The currently selected folder is marked with bold text and a light blue background, and when the mouse pointer enters the mailbox list the background changes to dark blue. The same with the message list, except here it's gray and dark blue. On the message view it's a thin black border as you mention.

You are probably right it's to show that the hot-tracking is working.

[Scott]

I don't have any of that, because I got rid of the default ugly colors and made my client as plain as possible.  The "skin" I use is attached here.  I thought there was more to it than one INI file, so I would be somewhat surprised if this actually worked.  The one thing it won't change is the stupid orange mailbox icons; to change that, you can follow the instructions here (which I wrote).

[zridling]

Just a question: Will this review include the major webmail clients such as Gmail and Yahoo? I mention these two because at 2+Gb, they're essentially unlimited email. I know Gmail does almost all of what Jibz listed above, but its filtering capabilities are almost unmatched. I'm not sure what percentage of people have a webmail account on top of their POP3 account, but when I travel, I don't have to worry what is where (or what is left behind on the home system), I just use Gmail and be done.

I'm different because in the past, most of my email time was wasted time. It's not much different now except I answer it 2-4 times a MONTH.

[mouser]

im finishing up the review now.
no it doesnt address webmail clients;
i have a personal bias against such things, and most web-related apps.
i like to have data and app on my computer, not floating around in the ethers.

[Jibz]

Services like gmail and yahoo mail are great for when you're traveling, or for unimportant chitchat, but if you have anything important in your e-mail, you'd better make sure you have local copies (and backups) .

You are at the mercy of whatever happens to the service, and you can be sure the TOS says it's tough luck if all your e-mail is mysteriously gone .

I got burned a long time ago with hotmail, where the spam rose to incredible levels after the Microsoft takeover. Thanks to the brilliant policy of deleting your oldest e-mail to make more room when your mailbox was full, I lost some important messages. Yes, that's right .. "You've received 1.5mb of spam and worms in your Junk folder today, so we'll just delete your old archived mail to make room for some more" .

[Scott]

If you're travelling, couldn't you just run an email client from a flash drive or something?

[Jibz]

You could, but you cannot always expect to be allowed to plug storage devices into computers and run arbitrary programs. You can almost always find a place where you can use a web browser though .

[zridling]

Jibz and mouser make good points, but unlike them, I don't have any important emails. So I admit that's not normal by any measure.

[JeffK]

FWIW I have been using Thunderbird at home.  However I like the web interface of my main provider, fastmail.fm which I use at work  The interface is quite powerful.

Jeff