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.
Comments on “In E-Mail Software, The Medium Is The Mess”
No Subject Given
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.
Mozilla Mail
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.
KMail
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.