The Bat is nice BUT... MAJOR omission no HTML

[telemachus]

Hello,

I think OE is still my Email Client of choice, I have tried almost everything. Thunderbird keeps on telling me there are unread messages which you cannot see in the Inbox and you have to change view to unread only to see these messges. Compacting makes no difference. Then I had a mailbox get corrupted and lost a LOT of mails, something that did not happen in 8 years of OE.

The bat?

NO HTML IMAGES INLINE is an unbelievable ommission, unfathomable that ANY email client, let alone one with such an array of features, would miss this BASIC ability.

Then

autocomplete when typing in addresses is very slow, i have finished typing "john smith" and press SEND before it gives suggestions.

I send to "john smith" and it tries to send, but then gives a server error - ie it is not smart enough to know "john smith" is a name, not an email address and it should automatically assign an email address to that name. (OE has done this for years)

inbox goes bold when messages arrive, but no # to say how many new/unread messages in the folder

when entering custom keyboard shortcuts, it does not tell you if one of those is used for something else already.

There are a few other things, like the web forum I belong to allows users to reply to messages which are sent to our POP addresses, this works with OE an Thunderbird, but with the bat I get a message back saying "The message was empty, please fill in the message field" This, and the lack of HTML makes it unuseable.

Mark Palmos,
UK.

[f0dder]

NO HTML IMAGES INLINE is an unbelievable ommission, unfathomable that ANY email client, let alone one with such an array of features, would miss this BASIC ability.

Security as well as privacy feature.

autocomplete when typing in addresses is very slow, i have finished typing "john smith" and press SEND before it gives suggestions.

It's not slow, it just has a pause after you stop typing, to avoid auto-suggestions popping up all the time. The delay *is* a bit longish though, and I didn't find a way to tweak it within a minute of looking through the UI.

inbox goes bold when messages arrive, but no # to say how many new/unread messages in the folder

See attached image

like the web forum I belong to allows users to reply to messages which are sent to our POP addresses, this works with OE an Thunderbird, but with the bat I get a message back saying "The message was empty, please fill in the message field"

Sounds weird - most likely a problem with the forum software, not The Bat.

This, and the lack of HTML makes it unuseable.

The Bat does support HTML - but uses it's own internal safe renderer. I tend to set it to plaintext-only anyway, I loathe HTML mails.

[telemachus]

Hi there, thanks for the quick response.

Outlook Express, and other Email clients allow you to choose whether to see HTML images, letting you decide if you want to take the risk. I think a great addition would be to allow images but to give some extra protection from spyware/scripting etc... but removing images altogether is a pain, putting it mildly.

Autocomplete should dynamically update, like OE, and if you type john smith, it should know it must find name matches, and ask you which one if you have more than one addess for that name.

About the # of messages, oops, my newbie blindness... didnt see that, thanks, it helps!

About the web forum being the fault and not the bat, well i sent the exact same message back to the forum, using OE and the bat, and the OE one arrived, the bat got sent back, this happens every single time.

I also cant seem to see any results of the spam filter, it has been trained, but I was thinking it would work as effectively as Thunderbird, where you see the messages for a second, but they vanish to the spam folder. Does the plugin have to be "switched on" other than by training it?

Thanks again for your input,

Mark.

[Carol Haynes]

A perfect solution for me (re. HTML security) is to run Firetrust's Benign in the background with any mail app. It intercepts all email arriving any you can tailor Benign to strip out unwanted HTML, scripts and potential security issues (like one pixel images) before they ever reach your inbox. It has three basic security settings (High, Medium and Low) but each are completely customisable so you can either be casual about security or paranoid and strip out all HTML. Different profiles can be applied to different mail servers. You can also create your own security profiles.

The best thing is that the resulting email is still readable after unwanted crap is removed.

There is a trial version and the cost if you buy is $39.95.

The way it works is that you change your incoming mail server by adding a .b9 suffix and ensure the POP3 ports match between the mail app and B9. Most popular mail clients can be configured automatically.

You can also chain ports too so that if you use an antispam utility (such as POPfile) which works through the 'localhost' system you can pass incoming mail from one app to the next before it arrives at your inbox. (The settings take a bit of fiddling though!).

Here are screen shots of the security profile (Low) in B9 as configured on mys system.





See http://www.firetrust.com/firetrustbenign.html for details.

[telemachus]

hi there carol,
thanks for the response...
i guess my main want is to get images in html emails visible.
the ones which are dodgy, i would want the spam plugin to remove anyway!
ones im not sure of, i will disable the images for
in any event, i would want the bat to get with the programme and at least allow grown ups to decide if they want to see images in html emails or not  ;-)
catcha later
mark.

[Carol Haynes]

I agree - that is why I played with the Bat briefly but decided it wasn't for me.

My previous post was really to illustrate that security needn't be a security issue when using other email clients (and to suggest a useful app for anyone wanting to filter HTML mail content without making it unreadable).

[telemachus]

what do you use instead?
i like the threading of topics,  love the send-receive dialogue, tried and do not trust thunderbird, what else is there?
thanks
mark

[Carol Haynes]

Personally after trying a number of alternatives I have gone back to OulookXP - not perfect by any means but with combined with Benign it works well enough for me.

[telemachus]

hi,
yeah, well i am just gonna have to stay with OE till the bat gets with it a bit more.
till later
thanks for the input
mark.