In E-Mail Software, The Medium Is The Mess

from the nothing-doing dept

This weekend I was talking with a friend of mine who was telling me about some great new spam filter he had installed for Outlook Express. When I took a look and pointed out that it didn't work with my email client of choice, Eudora, he made fun of me for being the only Eudora user left on the planet. On a whim, I started looking at various other email clients to see what features they offered, and realized I'm still happy with Eudora and there doesn't seem to be anything much more impressive out there. The Washington Post now has an article saying that no matter what popular email client you use, whether it's Outlook Express, Eudora or Netscape's mail program, they all basically suck. There are many obvious features that they all should include, and none of them do. Microsoft doesn't put too much development effort into Outlook Express (leaving that for plain old Outlook, which businesses use). Qualcomm says new things are coming for Eudora, and Netscape isn't at all focused on the mail client. The best bet for consumer mail clients may come from the open source world, it seems. While Mitch Kapor claims that Chandler is designed for businesses, maybe he should look at a consumer oriented client as well.

3 Comments | Leave a Comment..


If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...
 

Reader Comments (rss)

(Flattened / Threaded)

  1.  

    No Subject Given

    identicon
    COD, Dec 23rd, 2002 @ 8:01am

    Although I am looking forward to Chandler, the best solution for now is to look to the Shareware world. I use Pocomail - a $25 shareware client that is fairly stable, immune to the Outlook trojans, stores everything as text files for easy managibility and portability, has a robust filter system, and a surprisingly effective built in spam filter.

    OF course, using shareware does require us consumers to pay for software, something we seem to have a problem with ;) The Bat and Calypso are two other shareware mail clients that I have heard good things about.

    reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  2.  

    Mozilla Mail

    identicon
    Christian K, Dec 23rd, 2002 @ 9:35am

    I use Mozilla Mail, which works wonderfully on my various OS (Windows XP, linux, MacOS 9). And it just keeps getting better and better. The Mozilla team just rocks.

    reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  3.  

    KMail

    identicon
    Richard Jones, Dec 23rd, 2002 @ 6:00pm

    KDE's mailer, KMail, is a very user-friendly mail app. It's got all the good things from a bunch of different mailers without what seems like the arbitrary restrictions present in them.

    reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]


Add Your Comment

Have a Techdirt Account? Sign in now. Want one? Register here
Get Techdirt’s Daily Email
Save me a cookie
  • Note: A CRLF will be replaced by a break tag (<br>), all other allowable HTML will remain intact
  • Allowed HTML Tags: <b> <i> <a> <em> <br> <strong> <blockquote> <hr> <tt>


A word from our Sponsors...
Follow Techdirt
Flattr rss rss
From the Techdirt Archive...
A word from our Sponsors...

Close

Email This