Beyond Outlook: Five Alternative E-Mail Apps

If I say the word "e-mail" to you, chances are that one of the first (if not the first) words that will pop into your head will be Outlook. Because Outlook Express has historically shipped along with Windows, and because the Outlook personal information manager is an indelible part of Microsoft Office, they seem to be on almost everyone's desktop. The only other e-mail applications that even approach the same public awareness levels are Lotus Notes (for business users), and America Online (for consumers). However, for many users, these are not viable alternatives -- the former is an expensive and highly complex enterprise messaging system, and the latter is...well...AOL.

If you're the type of person who wants to be able to choose an e-mail package that's easier, or more configurable, or less expensive, or simply not Microsoft, take heart. There are a number of other options out there.

The Basics And Beyond
You'll find that nearly all e-mail packages offer the same basic functionality. They allow you to collect and send IMAP and POP3 e-mail, organize your e-mail into folders, search your existing e-mail, and maintain a contact list.

Get past the first layer, though, and you start to see differences in available features, ease of use, and even what kind of user the application is appealing to. For example, Mozilla's Thunderbird starts with a very basic e-mail application and encourages its users to add features via extensions and themes. Poco Systems' PocoMail, on the other hand, encourages individuals to use its PocoScript scripting language to do their own tweaks. Qualcomm's Eudora offers the chance to organize and individualize your e-mail accounts through the use of "personalities," while Pegasus Mail provides advanced sorting capabilities and RIT Labs' The Bat! gives power users the ability to thoroughly automate their workday.

Five Favorites
To help you choose, we've found five writers who are currently using (or have recently used) an alternative e-mail package. We've asked them to explain why they chose their favored app, what it is about the software that first attracted them, and why they are sticking with it (or why they finally left it for a better, or shinier, application).E-mail has become one of the primary ways we communicate with each other today, so it's vital that you have an e-mail application that does what you want it to do. Read through our writers' descriptions of their favorites, and see if any of them convince you to switch.

--Barbara Krasnoff

Eudora 7.0
By Cyndy Bates Finnie

Eudora and I go back -- way back. My earliest e-mail dates from 1996, making this the longest relationship I've ever had with a software application. Quicken is a close second, but loses out by a couple years -- and unlike Quicken, I use Eudora almost every day.

Don't get me wrong. My sticking with Eudora this long doesn't necessarily make it a must-have application. I feel like the centenarian who, when asked about the secret of his longevity, replied, "I've lived this long because I haven't died yet." Why have I used Eudora for the last ten years? Because I haven't switched yet.

Why haven't I switched? Well, Eudora works. It doesn't give me any major grief. And, oh yeah, it's kept working through I don't know how many version updates, and hardware and operating system changes. That alone is a major accomplishment for any application, but especially a non-Microsoft one.So when version 7 of Eudora was released, I got really excited. I was hoping I'd find that killer must-have feature that would not only justify our past, but guarantee a long-term commitment into the future.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Eudora 7's new feature list had exactly four items on it. (I've been looking at new products for nearly 15 years, and I can't remember a major x.0 release having just four new features.) They include a faster search, a feature called BossWatch, remote access for IMAP users, and an S/MIME plug-in for enterprise users. Not a useful list in my case, especially considering I don't use IMAP and am not an enterprise user.

That being said, this version, like previous versions, installed beautifully, finding my previous collection of e-mail without losing any of my messages or stored information. One of the things I like best about Eudora is that when I need to move it to a new computer or upgrade the operating system, Eudora just goes along. In ten years of upgrades, I've lost track of the number of computers I've moved my mail store to -- at least five or six -- but I've never had a problem upgrading Eudora.   (continued)

Eudora 7.0

Display And Organization
The interface in version 7 is unchanged from the previous version. It uses a folder metaphor for organizing mail, starting with the usual In, Out, and Trash mailboxes; then you create as many more as you like. You can also group mailboxes together in folders for better organization. Storing messages in mailboxes is drag-and-drop easy; you can also set up filtering rules, so that as messages are downloaded from the server, they are automatically routed to the correct folder.You can filter mail by sender, recipient, and words in the subject or body; you can also set up a second condition that moves the message into a folder or performs an action like copy to, forward, or notify. For example, I can have all e-mail sent by family members moved to a single folder. I can also automatically trash e-mails with certain subjects. Filters can be as simple or complex as your own organizational tendencies allow.

One problem with Eudora is that managing the filtering rules isn't easy. The rules appear in one long list with no way to sort or search. If you have only a dozen rules, this isn't be a big deal, but after ten years I have considerably more, with no easy way to manage them.

Eudora's basic interface lets you resize and rearrange elements of the screen to your liking -- the icon bar, mailbox list, message window and status bar can be moved, resized, docked, or left floating. You can also opt to not display them and save screen real estate.One of the things that used to drive me crazy was the molasses-slow e-mail finder within Eudora. It was so slow as to be unusable. In fact, the main reason I installed Copernic Desktop Search was to be able to search my Eudora mail, as well as files, and turn up results fast. Version 7 of Eudora includes a new indexing engine (they've licensed the X1 indexing engine), so it's now wicked fast -- even searching through the more than 30,000 e-mail messages that I have.

Did you ever respond to a joke e-mail in a less-than-professional manner, only to realize after you sent it that your boss was on the distribution list? Eudora 7 can't recall a sent e-mail, but it can give you a heads-up that you're about to do something really stupid. A new feature called BossWatch notifies you if your boss -- or any person you designate -- is on the recipient list for an e-mail. This comes in handy, particularly when choosing Reply All to a message with a large distribution list. Those whose names are on the BossWatch list appear in magenta, and the Message Send or Queue button is outlined in magenta to alert you.

All My Selves

New features are one thing, but the best thing about the new version of Eudora is that its maker, Qualcomm, follows the old adage, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." All the things that have kept me using Eudora in the past are still there.

For example, I love the way Eudora manages all my personalities. No, I'm not schizophrenic -- I just have many, many e-mail addresses. Between my domains, Gmail, AIM, and a couple of anonymous addresses, there's no way I could remember them all. Eudora automatically checks each one and downloads the mail. I don't even have to remember the passwords.When writing new mail, I just select who I want to be for the day from the drop-down menu and start typing. It also automatically sends replies from the same personality as the original e-mail was sent to. I've even set up a personality for Yahoo mail -- I can't read Web-based mail using Eudora, but it helps me remember the account details. You can also predefine signatures and stationery based on the personality.

In fact, I like the personality setup so much, I wish it did more. For example, I've set Eudora to check my e-mail accounts every ten minutes or so. It would be nice to be able to adjust this for each personality, because I don't need to check some of them more than a couple times a day.   (continued)

Eudora 7.0

One question that always comes up when you're dealing with freeware or shareware is: How do they make their money? In the case of Eudora, they offer three different functionality levels in one download.

For those looking to just try out Eudora, there's Eudora Light. It's always free. It's a simplified version of Eudora, but is a fully-functioning, no-ads e-mailer that will import mail and contact info from Netscape Messenger, Microsoft Outlook, and Outlook Express.

If you like free, but want more features (such as support for multiple personalities, message stationery, and signatures), there's the ad-supported mode. The ad appears by default on the left side of the application, but you can change its location. If you try the ad and decide it's annoying, you just switch back to Eudora Light.

If you like Eudora's advanced features and decide to stick with it, the subscription price is $49.95 a year. This gets you a registration code, along with features such as fast search, BossWatch, and SpamWatch. It's well worth the money just to get rid of the ad and take back the screen real estate.

Nothing But E-Mail
Eudora does have some limitations. For example, unlike some other e-mail programs, Eudora's Address Book is just that -- an address book, not a contact manager. As long as you don't expect more, it works.

You can include a person's first and last names, e-mail address, phone numbers, snail mail address and notes. The only necessary information, though, is what Eudora calls the nickname (which is the person's full name, or whatever you want to call them) and the e-mail address. In fact, because Eudora doesn't do the best job of managing multiple e-mail addresses for one person, it's a good idea to create separate entries for each address (such as "Steve Home," "Steve Work," etc.). The address book also isn't searchable, but you can create distribution groups.

Eudora doesn't include a calendar, task list, or RSS reader. It's very much focused on being a usable e-mail application. The paid version does include a trainable spam filter called SpamWatch, which gives you the option to automatically put spam into a Junk folder. SpamWatch has been active on my system for a few years, and it works very well. It almost never junks "good" e-mail, and when it has, it's usually been commercial notices that I signed up for, nothing truly personal. (I wind up having to manually delete some junk, but that's okay.)

To be honest, there are a few other problems that I wish the folks at Qualcomm would fix. For example, when I re-activate my notebook after it has gone into hibernation, Eudora frequently closes unexpectedly. (Thankfully, it's really good at not losing e-mail messages, and rebuilds the message list the next time it opens. While this can result in duplicate messages, it also makes sure that I never lose anything important.)

Another pet peeve has to do with the interface design. When you right-click on the Windows taskbar to get the menu associated with one of your applications, most Windows applications have "Close" as their bottommost command. Eudora, however, chose to be different -- its bottommost command is Check Mail. I can't tell you how many times I've gone to close Eudora, accidentally selected Check Mail instead, and had to wait for it to check all my accounts.

Conclusion
If asked, I would have said that there was no chance of my spending ten years with a single application. In fact, the way software develops, I'd have said the odds were considerably against it.

Maybe someday I'll find another e-mail program that's easy to use, manages multiple e-mail addresses, has a simple folder scheme for storing and retrieving e-mail, and is easy to move from PC to PC. Maybe I'll get lucky and the new program will manage contacts and tasks, include a calendar, and read RSS feeds. But until that happens, I'll keep using Eudora.

(Next page: Pegasus Mail)

Pegasus Mail 4.3

By Dennis Fowler

In Greek mythology, the winged horse Pegasus was the son of the sea god Poseidon and the Gorgon Medusa, springing from Medusa's neck when she was beheaded by Perseus. The birth of Pegasus Mail didn't involve any bloodshed -- at least as far as I know -- but in Internet years it is almost as venerable as the Greek myth, and its release to the public was, if not heroic, certainly altruistic.

Pegasus Mail (PMail for short) sent its first message in December 1989 over the Novell network of a university in Dunedin, New Zealand. After only a three-month in-house gestation, it was released to the public by its author, David Harris. "It dates from the time when the Internet was a community rather than just a highway -- when people helped each other without worrying too much about who was going to pay for it," wrote Harris in an essay about Pegasus' history on the application's Web site.

I've been riding Pegasus for so long I can't even remember when I first saddled up. I confess I have never touched Microsoft's e-mail clients, scared off by their gaping security issues. I remember looking at Eudora somewhere along the line and finding it too cumbersome. Once aboard Pegasus, I looked no further.

A Wide Range Of Possibilities
As you'd expect, PMail supports all the standards -- POP3, SMTP, IMAP4, and LDAP -- and you can use multiple identities and multiple POP3 servers. It also supports multiple users on one computer (with shared and private folders), and on a LAN it can exchange e-mail with other Pegasus users without the need for a server.

As far as operating systems are concerned, Pegasus has evolved along with the rest of the world, but legacy systems haven't been abandoned. Version 4.31 is for 32-bit Windows, but version 3.12b is still available for all 16-bit versions of Windows, as is Pegasus Mail for MS-DOS v3.5.

All versions support Netware, and if you're still using Netware 3.x or earlier, a Pegasus Mail NDS utility package is available. It also supports Windows NT4 networks, Windows peer-to-peer, LANtastic and similar peer-to-peer networks. In addition to English, Pegasus Mail is available in French, German, Czech, and Dutch.

Version 4.1 gave Pegasus a Windows XP look and feel; version 4.31 completes the evolution. While on the surface 4.31 looks like a minor upgrade, the documentation notes it underwent 80 beta releases. Some of the changes are obvious -- there are different icons and a new logo, for example. But it's the less-visible stuff that really matters. For example, the HTML rendering engine underwent a major rewrite, improving the application's display of HTML and making it more robust, while retaining the security of the old engine.

When you install the application, a wizard walks you through PMail's setup, and there are other wizards for things like filtering. However, getting the most out of Pegasus Mail takes more digging, and the help files can be confusing. For example, it took a bit of investigating for me to find out how to turn Preview Mode on and off in the list of folders. There are also a number of command-line options available for more sophisticated users that are more easily referenced in the printed manual. (A single-user license for the manual (which is printed in PDF format), is $29.95 and includes a one-year subscription for updates. The Web site also offers ample support. )   (continued)

Pegasus Mail 4.3

Seek And Ye Shall Find

If you're like me, you've got more e-mail stored on your computer than almost anything else (I've got about 64MB-worth). As a result, no amount of filtering (and PMail has excellent filtering), organization, or sorting can help me find that message -- you know, the one that I remember I got maybe last year about something important but can't remember where I put it?That usually means a search, which was not something I looked forward to in previous versions of PMail. Searches were slow, unavoidably broad, and the results were poorly displayed. However, in its latest version, Pegasus has dramatically improved searches, speeding them up and adding options to refine them. These new options include the ability to search within a user-definable date or age range, as well as various set ranges such as the last 24 hours, seven days, calendar month, calendar year, 365 days, etc. I can search subject lines or message text, and even specify the color I assigned to a message.

The results of a full text search of all 64MB in my mail folder appeared in about 30 seconds. The results were also more accessible, presented in a new feature called a Link Folder.

As with other e-mail clients, PMail organizes messages in a hierarchical structure of trays that hold folders that, in turn, hold messages. A Link Folder, instead of holding messages, holds links to messages still in their original folders.

Link folders have all the capabilities of a regular mail folder but are more compact. You can sort the links just as you would the messages in a regular folder, without disturbing anything in the messages' actual location. Naturally, if you delete or move the actual message, the link will be broken, but deleting the entry in a Link Folder does not delete the message.

You can create your own Link Folders using the drop-down pick list on the New Folder dialog box. You can drag and drop messages into a Link Folder, at which point an information box pops up explaining that you're working with a Link Folder, and what that means.

PMail's sorting capabilities are also awesome, letting you sort by sender, subject line, date, color, size, or thread, in forward or reverse order. In addition, messages can be grouped within a folder by day, week, month, sender, color, thread, or thread activity, and indexed by subject or sender.

In addition to populating Link Folders, drag-and-drop can be used to add attachments to messages, move folders and trays, and copy or move addresses from one address book to another, to a distribution list, to the address field of new message, etc.   (continued)

Pegasus Mail 4.3Armor And Shield Included
Security features have always made PMail stand out from the crowd. If there's a choice to be made, PMail prefers the safe road, even while striking a compromise with user wishes. For example, a message written in HTML with a link to a remote graphic image (what David Harris calls "lazy HTML") is an invitation to a malicious download. In the past PMail would never, ever open such a link. But, bowing to user wishes, Harris has loosened that in 4.31. You can override the blocking for specific sites you trust, a change Harris says he made reluctantly.

In fact, Harris claims that Pegasus is "immune to all the exploits that affect the 'other' mailer." So take THAT, Microsoft!

Those are, I note, his words, not mine -- well, except for that last little jibe, anyway. But I've never had any reason to doubt them. Using Pegasus for e-mail means I just don't worry about e-mail-borne infections, with the caveat that I still don't open attachments casually. I don't know of any e-mail threat that can prey on PMail's address books the way they can on Outlook's.

In line with this safety philosophy, the latest version of Pegasus adds anti-phishing protection, scanning messages for tell-tale clues such as suspicious HTML links, and warning of the risks.As far as spam in concerned, there is a content-blocking feature with a basic file of words and phrases (e.g. Viagra, credit rating, earn good money, etc.) that will be searched for in both the subject line and body of messages. It will also assign a "weight" to each suspect it encounters. When a threshold is reached, it sends the suspect message to a user-specified folder.

In addition, messages are checked against user created blacklists and whitelists.

By default, all that is turned off, leaving it up to the user to enable it. You can edit the content file, as well as creating blacklists and whitelists of senders, but how far it goes is up to you.

Keep Composed
As far as composing and sending goes, the changes in version 4.31 are less obvious. It has the same effective address handling, offering distribution lists and mail merge. British or American spell checking is included, as is auto-correction of common typos (e.g., "abuot" to "about"). As always, if you want to compose your e-mail in HTML, it offers that option in, as Harris says, "a responsible form -- no remote images, scripts or other nasties, just a good range of tables, images and the other formatting you need for real mail."

The main new thing is that PMail now uses a format called "multipart/related" when sending HTML messages, which, according to the Web site, should help recipients using applications like Mozilla Thunderbird to view such material transparently.All of these features take up less than 6MB of disk space, plus what is required for mail storage, of course. The program needs 4MB of RAM above minimum system requirements to run. It is quick, efficient, and above all, safe, and I wouldn't want any other e-mail program on my computer.

(Next page: PocoMail)

PocoMail 4.1
By Mitch Wagner

If you're a real e-mail power-user, if you want to customize your e-mail out the wazoo, if you get hundreds or thousands of messages a day, and you want to automatically sort them into folders and generate automated responses based on the contents, then PocoMail is the package for you.

On the other hand, if you're just looking for a simple e-mail package -- even if you get a lot of mail -- then you probably want to look elsewhere. It's kind of complicated and temperamental, and is prone to crashes. PocoMail is the biggest, brawniest e-mail SUV available for Windows clients; you don't need all that power if all you plan to do is drive an exit or two on the information superhighway.

Poco Systems released version 4.1 of PocoMail in April; it's a minor improvement, with upgrades to features like account configuration, the HTML display, and stability. Version 4.0, which was the last big upgrade, added support for RSS feeds, a user interface upgrade, and improved search and IMAP support, among other features.

Most important among the improvements in 4.0 and 4.1 are bug fixes. With PocoMail 4.0 and 4.1, the number of crashes I experienced was reduced from daily to once or twice a week.

PocoMail starts with the basic functionality you'd expect in any e-mail program. You get a three-pane view of e-mail, showing a list of folders, your message headers, and a preview of the body of a selected message. You can send and receive POP and IMAP mail. You can check mail manually or automatically, at intervals. You can store contacts, including e-mail addresses, phone numbers, street addresses, and so forth.PocoMail has a variety of advanced features that give the app its real power, of which the most important are the Console and the PocoScript scripting language. These two features are the heart and lungs of PocoMail, and it's hard for me to remember which I loved more. (Yes, "loved." I'm no longer using PocoMail. More on that later.)   (continued)

PocoMail 4.1

The Consolation Prize
The Console is a very small window that sits unobtrusively wherever you want to park it on your display. When new mail comes in, the Console shows the sender, subject line, and a few words of text from each new message.

The Console is a wonderful tool for managing e-mail overload. When new e-mail comes, you don't have to break your concentration by stopping what you're doing in another application, switching to your mail client, and checking to see if the message is important. You can just glance at the console, read the name of the message sender and subject line, and decide right there whether to open the message and read it right away, or delete the message from the Console and read the message later.Deleting the message from the Console does not necessarily delete the message from PocoMail itself (although you can if you want to), or even mark that message as read. Even after a message has been deleted from the console, you can still read and deal with the message later.

The Console makes it easy to decide which incoming e-mail messages require immediate attention, and which can wait. You can jump on the e-mail from your boss right away, while waiting until later to read the joke from Larry in Accounting. (On the other hand, Larry is a pretty funny guy, and you could use a laugh after the day you're having. Go on, read Larry's mail. I'll wait until you come back.)

As far as I can see, the Console is unique in Windows e-mail clients. E-mail overload is a major problem for today's knowledge workers; the Console is a great tool for managing that workload.

PocoScript Allows Sweet Scriptiness
PocoScript is a powerful, yet simple, scripting language that lets you search on text anywhere in the body or header of a message, and take a variety of actions based on the contents of those messages. Most e-mail programs offer a small fraction of PocoScript's capabilities using features known variously as "filters" or "rules." But PocoMail scripting lets you set up complicated conditions for message handling, including if/then/else loops, labeled subroutines, customized error messages, and other sweet, scripty stuff.Poco Systems provides a library of PocoScript scripts that users can download and install for free. There's a wide variety of scripts for handling spam, a script that will do a dictionary lookup of selected words in an e-mail message, scripts to automatically add a message sender to an e-mail group, or, alternately, remove a message sender from a group, add multi-line taglines to outgoing messages, and more. Registered PocoMail users can download scripts from the library, or write their own.

If you haven't got the technical skills to handle PocoScript, PocoMail also has e-mail filters that are easier to use, and similar to those offered by major e-mail competitors like Outlook and Eudora, allowing you to automatically move or copy messages to folders, delete messages, automatically reply to messages, and so forth.   (continued)

PocoMail 4.1

Spam Filters
One area where PocoMail falls down: Its spam filters don't do a very good job of separating spam from non-spam. But that's not very important; there are plenty of third-party spam filters out there that do a great job and work with PocoMail. I'm a big fan of POPFile myself, and found it works well as an add-on to e-mail clients including PocoMail, Thunderbird, Outlook, and Opera. Other well-respected spam filters include SpamBayes and K9.The RSS feeds support is rudimentary, good for subscribing to one or two feeds for real-time updates. But RSS feed users get the real benefit of the technology when they subscribe to a dozen or more feeds, and PocoMail doesn't make it practical to do that. For one thing, you can't import and export feeds using the standard OPML format, which means that if you want to transfer your subscriptions from another RSS feed client, you have to cut-and-paste each individual URL manually, which is very inconvenient.

Likewise, PocoMail's newsgroups client isn't good for reading newsgroups that get even a moderate amount of traffic; the filters PocoScript provides make it hard to build rules for highlighting and ignoring messages on the fly.

Still, as a powerful e-mail client for Windows, PocoMail can't be beat.

Second Thoughts
So if PocoMail is such hot cheese, why aren't I using it anymore?

Mainly, search. I've grown addicted to using instantaneous desktop search tools to find e-mail and files. I used to use X1; now I'm using Copernic. PocoMail isn't supported by any of those tools as far as I can see, and its own search is kind of slow.

The second reason for leaving PocoMail is stability. PocoMail has been out for many years, and it's been prone to crashing all that time. It's gotten steadily better, but I still found it crashed on me -- or otherwise suffered fatal malfunctions -- once or twice a week. That's actually not too bad -- if I'd been satisfied with the program overall, I would've happily stuck with it. But the need to shut down and restart the program a couple of times a week certainly didn't make it more attractive to me.

The third reason: Palm synchronization. I love my Palm Treo smartphone, and I want an e-mail program that will allow me to sync my address book between the Palm desktop and Treo. PocoMail can be purchased as a stand-alone program, or as one component of a personal information manager called Barca. Barca used to have Palm sync in previous versions, but it doesn't have it in the current version, and Poco Systems is showing no indication that they're going to update Palm sync anytime soon.

The e-mail program I ended up switching to was Thunderbird. Ironically, Thunderbird doesn't support Palm sync, but it does support search, it's more stable than Poco, and I'm betting it'll get Palm sync before Poco does.

I bailed because I found I just didn't need the complexity. Years ago, when I had a half-dozen e-mail accounts, I did. Now, I've consolidated my e-mail accounts down to one major account (plus another that I rarely check). And I don't use rules to do all the automated mail-sorting and filtering that I used to do; I've found that POPfile, in addition to being a great spam filter, does a good job doing those things for me.But if you get a lot of e-mail -- I mean a lot -- and you need complex tools for automated sorting and replies, PocoMail could be right for you.

(Next page: The Bat!)

The Bat! 3.8
By Curtis Franklin

Several years ago, I was looking around for alternative e-mail clients. I wanted something that wasn't as big a target for mischief-makers as Outlook had become, was relatively easy to set up and use, and had a reasonable list of automation and security features.

I settled on The Bat!, a European import that satisfied my needs and left me feeling good about the choice. In an environment of "do it all" software that treats e-mail as just another transport for scheduling and workflow, it can be refreshing to use a program that focuses on getting e-mail right. The Bat!, from RITLabs, has been improving steadily for years, and the latest version of The Bat! Professional offers very good security, solid message filtering, and integration with MAPI e-mail servers that is significantly improved from earlier versions -- though it still has a couple of quirks that you'll need to be aware of.

Getting Started
When you first download The Bat!, you choose between the Home and Professional editions based largely on the features you need. The Professional edition adds a spell-checker, multiple language support, hardware authentication, on-the-fly encryption, and optional biometric authentication to the basic features of the Home edition. I've tended to stick with the professional edition of The Bat! because I enjoy the spell-checker and appreciate the encryption. The additional functions add minimally to the cost of The Bat -- the Professional edition is $45, versus $35 for the Home edition.

I downloaded the Professional Version (a 10MB download) and performed a full install on my IBM ThinkPad T42. The main questions to be answered during the installation process had to do with security: Did I want to encrypt the message database? Did I want to have a password for accessing my e-mail? What sort of authentication does my e-mail server require? I chose to encrypt the database since I use the laptop as my primary machine and carry it with me to all sorts of places. With the database encrypted and a different password than the one I use for my primary system login, I felt fairly confident that my personal messages would remain personal, even if the laptop went missing.

Once installed, I decided to prime the e-mail pump by importing the messages from a business account that I normally access via Microsoft Outlook. The Bat! makes importing files quite easy: I told it which program and format to import from, and 17 minutes later more than 23,000 e-mail messages had been ported from Outlook to The Bat! All my folders, attachments, and messages were retained and moved. I was pleased to find that, even with a relatively large message database and encryption turned on, launching The Bat! took five seconds or less -- impressive speed for the size and protection.If you just want a way to read your mail and send simple messages, The Bat! is a perfectly functional solution at a reasonable price -- for example, I feel comfortable having The Bat! as my teenage son's e-mail client since the basic functions are quite easy to learn -- but using the program as a basic mail reader wastes much of The Bat!'s power. The Bat! really comes into its own when you use its automated functions to handle sorting, distributing, acting upon, and responding to messages without your intervention. If you want an e-mail client that can act like an executive assistant, filing and sorting your messages, responding to routine messages without having to bother you, and in general making your communications life much more productive, then The Bat! is a very strong candidate for the job.   (continued)

The Bat! 3.8

The Sorting Office
I like my e-mail client to funnel incoming work mail into different "unread" folders based on which address received the mail. In this case, I had three accounts that each had at least a dozen message folders. In The Bat!, I was able to create the filters and rules by going into the Sorting Office option and selecting the account, folder, and characteristics of the messages I wanted to filter, and then precisely what to do with them once they've been identified.

It took less than two minutes to set up each of the basic filtering rules. The ability to automatically move messages around isn't particularly exciting, but the list of actions that can be invoked is extensive. It's very easy to have a message printed out, to begin scheduled tasks, to create responses (and these responses can be highly complex, with personalization based on address book information and a wide range of variables), or to execute other software, gather the results of these external operations, and use them in a highly formatted response message. A new feature in version 3.8 shows all your filters for a particular account at once, letting you see which are active and which have hot keys attached, and giving a visual "building block" approach to adding new rules and filters.

How far can the Sorting Office take you? It's well suited for e-mail-based commerce (in which receipt of the order is acknowledged, a work order is generated through a separate application, and a paper job ticket is printed), and a RitLabs-related site has easy-to-follow instructions on using The Bat! as a mailing list manager for discussion groups and e-mail community operations. In my case, I was able to quickly (within half an hour) generate a system in which a central emergency operation system could receive weather observations from SkyWarn spotters and, based on keywords within the subject line and the message itself, print out messages for emergency managers and forward an overlapping set of messages to the National Weather Service.

Using templates for messages you're creating in the course of normal correspondence is relatively trivial for most of us -- we might use a different signature block depending on whether the message is from our personal or corporate persona -- but the templates within The Bat! really take off when they're used to create messages that the Sorting Office generates automatically. Blocks of text can contain information ranging from the simple (a recipient name taken from your address book or the instigating e-mail message) to the complex (a parameter whose value is generated by a separate program), making it possible to create responses that are sufficiently personalized to give the impression of having been generated by a human.   (continued)

The Bat! 3.8

Keep Synchronized
One of the realities of modern business life is that you may regularly use two or more computers. Many e-mail clients are, at best, difficult to use if you have a single set of accounts that you want to use on multiple machines (especially if you need to have access to all your messages, address book information, and downloaded attachments). The Bat! builds a map of files that allows you to transfer all information from one installation to another. Synchronizing two installations is a three-step process, but the steps are highly automated (and could, given The Bat!'s scheduling and automation capabilities, be performed as hands-off overnight or end-of-day tasks).

Speaking of multiple computers, there are still places where a laptop computer may have to make use of a dial-up connection to reach the Internet and the e-mail server. The Bat! provides a neat feature: a the "message dispatcher" that lets you view messages' subject lines without downloading them, something that will warm the heart of anyone who's ever received an unexpected PowerPoint presentation via slow dial-up.

Making Changes
Changes in the latest version of The Bat! include a revision to the Folder Properties interface that makes it easier to see and develop special characteristics for each folder. As an example, I was able to quickly expand the personal customization so amateur radio messages look different from school booster organization messages, which look different from NWS SkyWarn messages. The nice thing is that the new interface makes it very easy to see how the templates for messages are associated with each folder so you can quickly customize the way your messages appear.

While the "pretty face" improvements are significant, they aren't the only changes. Though it still needs Outlook or the Exchange Client for IMAP access, The Bat! has added fetching functionality to its IMAP arsenal, and there's a long list of bug fixes made in the latest version. No complex updating process is required to make the change -- registered users can simply download the new version, install it over their older software, and be off and running.

Conclusions
I've spent a lot of time on the automation functions because they tend to separate The Bat! from other e-mail clients. That automation is supported, though, by a program that readily performs all the basic tasks required for e-mail. There's a solid editor and image viewer, easy customization of how you want the interface to look, and enough colors and combinations to make your eyes swim.In fact, the latest version of The Bat! has made it even easier to customize the look of the software. Depending on your needs, you can quickly see as many or as few messages as you'd like, in different colors based on criteria you choose, and with your choice of actions taken concerning attachments and programming. When you combine the interface changes with new message alerts like the translucent ticker-tape and sounds, The Bat! offers as many different ways to work with your e-mail program as I've ever seen.

Is The Bat! perfect? No. You'll have to install Outlook or the Exchange Client if you want to use the MIME protocol, and the sheer number of features means that learning The Bat! can be difficult. That's especially true when it comes to the security features of this program. I'm fairly well-versed in security schemes and features, and I still decided to opt for simple choices in encryption and authentication. On the other hand, if your organization uses security features that are outside the most common list, the odds are quite good that The Bat! will support what you want to do.

With all that said, The Bat! is, in most respects, exactly what most people say they want their software to be -- an easy-to-use, powerful program that does one particular job very well. If you're ready to consider an application that doesn't hail from Redmond, The Bat! could make a great place to start.

(Next page: Thunderbird)

Thunderbird 1.5
By Ron Miller

Back in 2004, I was using Outlook Express and suffering from a tremendous spam problem, so I began using Thunderbird 1.0. Why? Well, quite frankly, I was also looking for an alternative to the big software companies and I liked the idea of an open-source e-mail client, especially one with a spam filter. In addition, release 1.0 provided native RSS support, which meant I could get my e-mail and my RSS feeds all in one package, a prospect that I found very attractive. And Thunderbird was supported on multiple platforms and came with an excellent search tool, making it a simple matter to locate just about any e-mail in my Inbox. I was sold.

Although Mozilla has grown into an organizational force in its own right, the software it produces, the Thunderbird e-mail client and the Firefox browser (among others), are still open-source programs. This means that a team of programmers from all over the world came together to make this work. Many are not employed by Mozilla, nor do they receive any remuneration for their effort, beyond the satisfaction of contributing to a project that could advance open-source computing.

These developers are not concerned about how their efforts affect bottom-line profits, nor are they focused on a particular operating environment. Lots of eyeballs are checking this software to make sure it's working correctly, reasonably secure, and free of bugs. Does that mean it actually is bug free and always works right? Hardly, but the last time I checked, neither were commercial software packages.

Thunderbird offers versions that run on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Not many commercial software packages pay attention to the Mac or Linux, most likely because it is not cost-effective to do so. Open-source developers have a legion of volunteers at their disposal, and are more interested in producing tools that everyone can use, regardless of the size of the market niche. Commercial software companies, because of their own bias or cost and resource restraints, do not have the luxury (or, often, the desire) of developing for less popular platforms.

The latest version, Thunderbird 1.5, has been available since January (with one interim release, 1.5.0.2, that plugged 15 security holes). Although it's not a major upgrade, it sports some nifty new features, including on-the-fly spell checking, a built-in phishing detector, RSS feed import and export and more. Unfortunately, when I installed the shiny new version, several features that worked perfectly fine in 1.0 suddenly didn't work as well. That included my beloved RSS feeds and the spam filter, which seems to have lost some of its uncanny identification skill.

So while Thunderbird has a great deal of potential, it is by no means a perfect e-mail client (although I would venture to guess neither are the other candidates in this roundup). One thing to keep in mind when judging open-source software is to be careful of falling into the trap of judging it too harshly against competitors -- but conversely, neither should we take it too easy just because it has a friendlier business model.   (continued)
Thunderbird 1.5

Buh-Bye Junk Mail
As I mentioned, one of the main reasons I switched from Outlook Express to Thunderbird was its ability to filter out spam.

In order to take advantage of Thunderbird's anti-spam features, you need to turn on the adaptive filter and configure the junk mail controls. The adaptive filter actually learns what is spam based on the e-mail you mark as junk (you can whitelist anyone in your address book to prevent e-mails from people you know from ending up in the Junk folder). After a couple of weeks, Thunderbird takes care of most of your incoming spam for you, except for a few hiccups. You need to monitor the Junk folder periodically to make sure it doesn't snag any good e-mails, but I've found this is less a problem than leaving obvious junk mail in your Inbox.

Unfortunately, there are far too many disreputable marketers trying to use e-mail as a means of tracking your movements on the Internet or accessing personal information. In order to minimize the risk of this type of privacy invasion, Thunderbird hides all graphics in HTML e-mails by default. If you want to see the graphics, you click the Show Images button at the top of the e-mail window.

One new feature in version 1.5 is a phishing detector. This tool marks e-mails Thunderbird thinks could be scams trying to get your personal information. If the mail is valid, you can click the "Not a Scam" button. Unfortunately, Thunderbird is hyper-aggressive about what it believes is a scam -- such as just about every newsletter I get. Unlike the spam filter, it does not seem to learn each time you click "Not a Scam," so the next time you get your newsletter, you have to click it again.

RSS Feeds In Your Inbox
When I got Thunderbird 1.0 and learned how to add RSS feeds to my e-mail client, I was thrilled. It meant I could get updates to my favorite blogs and Web sites at the same time I was getting my e-mail. If you're not an RSS fan, this might not seem like such a big deal, but let me tell you, for somebody who spends a lot of time in his e-mail client, it's a fairly significant time saver. Unfortunately, when Thunderbird 1.5 came out, the RSS feature was broken, or at least very sick.

Luckily, another new feature turned out to be the ability to import and export RSS feeds. Since my old feeds did not work at all, I exported my feeds to an OPML file, deleted all the feeds from Thunderbird and tried importing them again, figuring that maybe the new version just needed a clean slate. I later learned that if there is any broken feed (or one that has trouble communicating with the source site), the RSS feature stops working altogether. (Mozilla came out with a fix for this in version 1.5.02.)   (continued)

Thunderbird 1.5Making Thunderbird Your Own
One of the great hallmarks of both Thunderbird and Firefox is the flexibility built into the interface. You are not locked into a standard look-and-feel or feature set -- in fact, the developers encourage people to develop themes to change the look of the software and extensions to extend its functionality. This means when users are frustrated because the package lacks a certain feature (such as the conspicuously missing calendar feature in Thunderbird), some enterprising programmers can get together and build the missing piece.

It's easy to change a theme in Thunderbird, and in doing so, change the entire feel of the program. For example, just recently I came across a theme that mirrors the Mac Tiger e-mail client, and applied it to my version of Thunderbird. It is really a beautifully crafted interface and I like it far better than the original. There are a myriad of themes available to match just about any taste.

There are not as many extensions available for Thunderbird as there are for the Firefox browser, and many of them are somewhat esoteric. It's also a bit more difficult to add extensions in Thunderbird than in Firefox, but Mozilla includes instructions on the download page to walk you through the process. In any case, the Thunderbird Add-Ons page on the Mozilla.org Web site is certainly worth a visit. (You can even add this page to your RSS feeds, so you'll know immediately when new or changed extensions are added.)

Searching For E-mails
Thunderbird also includes a search tool which is so good that I use only rudimentary folder filtering for some e-mails and leave the rest of my e-mail in my Inbox. I'm able to access just about any e-mail simply by entering a full or partial sender's name or subject in the Search box. It's quick and fairly straightforward, and there are a number of other search filters available, including a full-text search (which is thorough but very slow).

Sometimes the search tool has trouble finding e-mails if you enter a first name and the message was sent in the format last name, first name, but for the most part it works. What's more, you can save searches in what Thunderbird calls Search folders, where you can access your filtered results any time you need them.

I would be remiss if I did not mention some nasty performance problems I was experiencing just prior to the release of 1.5 that seemed to be related to the volume of e-mail I had. Thunderbird was taking forever to open and then to retrieve e-mail; and when the messages finally arrived, I had trouble opening and sending them. That issue, which seemed to have been related to the way the program manages memory, appears to have been fixed in 1.5 -- at least, I haven't experienced a similar issue since downloading the upgrade.

Thunderbird 1.5 is far from flawless, but it has a lot of attractive features -- and since it's open source, you can be sure that people are out there looking for ways to resolve the problems that do exist. This is very different from the commercial software world, where there is a tendency to minimize issues that are bad for the company's image. It's good to know that a community of users is always on your side, forcing the application forward and making it better.

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