Commenting on the Email Client Poll

On 6/22/2004 10:59, "Chris Pepper" <pepperreppep.com> wrote:

> Personally, I use webmail (SquirrelMail) infrequently, but
> it's quite important on occasion. On the other hand, I consider
> myself a Eudora user, and answered Eudora on the survey (I didn't
> answer again with webmail). If I switched today it would probably be
> to Mail in IMAP mode.

I couldn't answer the survey question.

I use Eudora for my company mail (because I like it, despite its crashing
habit), it works well for me in that context, and the rest of the company
also uses it for company mail).

I use Entourage for my mailing lists (I got tired of the Eudora crashing in
this context, and also got tired of restarting Eudora to use a different
configuration. I also use Entourage for the mail in my domain (where I get
most of my vendor-sent mail and almost no personal mail).

And I use Mail.app for my mac.com account (which I don't use for much aside
from testing) and my old OlympusNet personal account.

I like things about all of them--none is my favorite. I'm unhappy that once
again Entourage is only bundled, as I'm not at all sure I'm going to upgrade
Office when Office Pro comes out (I have VirtualPC, so I'll want to upgrade
that if I upgrade Office). Aside from the cost, it appears one can't get
one's full measure of support without setting up a Passport (I got by with
Office X by refusing to register it, and I really don't want Passport [it's
a trust thing]).

  --John

I didn't answer the email client poll since I'm forced by occupational
hazard to use Windows clients 99% of the time, but Chris Pepper's comments
below make me wonder if there might exist a user category called something
like "Enthusiastic Claris Emailer User in Sorry Arranged Marriage with MS
Outlook."

James Atkinson

>>At the bottom of the barrel, Emailer squeaked out 2 percent of the
>>vote with a little ballot-stuffing help from a mention on the
>>Emailer mailing list

>Personally, I use webmail (SquirrelMail) infrequently, but
>it's quite important on occasion. On the other hand, I consider
>myself a Eudora user, and answered Eudora on the survey (I didn't
>answer again with webmail). If I switched today it would

At 10:59 AM -0700 6/22/04, Chris Pepper wrote:
>
>Personally, I use webmail (SquirrelMail) infrequently, but it's
>quite important on occasion. On the other hand, I consider myself a
>Eudora user, and answered Eudora on the survey (I didn't answer
>again with webmail).

I, too, answered Eudora, but during the work day, I often use the
webmail features of .Mac and Earthlink to check email from my work
machine.

--
Alan Forkosh <aforkoshmac.com> Voice:(510)655-4221
Oakland, CA

At 15:58 -0700 UTC, on 2004-06-23, John W. Baxter wrote:

[...]

> I use Entourage for my mailing lists (I got tired of the Eudora crashing in
> this context,

I'm surprised. I never see Eudora crash, and I use it constantly. It's always
running, continously fetching mail (3 to 400 messages a day, 75% spam) and
doing lots of filtering. It deals with my 121 mail boxes containing some 9 or
10 years of email quite easily. The only single way I know of to crash Eudora
is to use John Delacour's MainPersonality Plug-in and then change the
personality on an incoming message. Might you be using that, or some other
third-party plug-in that does something funky? (I've been using a few other
third-party plug-ins, like SuperSleek and Personality Headers for many years
without any problem.)

> and also got tired of restarting Eudora to use a different
> configuration.

I suppose you might have to under some cirumstances, but you are aware of its
"Personalities" concept, right? And that you can change each x-eudora-setting
on a per-personality basis?

I too voted for Eudora. I do miss some things (thread by references, more
filter rules, triggering AS scripts through filters) and contains a few way
too long-standing bugs (silently dropiing characters from a too long filter
rule and not marking a mailbox as contaiining unread mail when the message in
question contains a date way back in the past), but it does what it needs to
do and doesn't waste space and cycles on trendy 3d junk ;)

--
Sander Tekelenburg, <http://www.euronet.nl/~tekelenb/>

I have recently started a workflow that reduces the CPU overhead of always leaving Entourage running – namely, running Pine in X11 to my IMAP server. I check my e-mail via Pine during the day (and manage the “throw-back” messages that I don’t need to keep) and should some message requiring urgent action arrive – I’ll fire up Entourage and retrieve my email – and stay connected until I’m done sending.

This has freed up a good deal of processor time on my PowerBook but it leads me to wonder – are there any happy Pine users among TidBITS Talk users? I’m aware of the disadvantages (which diminish with my using it – but I add the convenience of Palm syncing) but how does searching, cross-platform file enclosures, data import-export, as compared with the full GUI clients we are discussing?

Kyle

On 6/23/2004 16:36, "Sander Tekelenburg" <tekelenbeuronet.nl> wrote:

> At 15:58 -0700 UTC, on 2004-06-23, John W. Baxter wrote:
>
> [...]
>
>> I use Entourage for my mailing lists (I got tired of the Eudora crashing in
>> this context,
>
> I'm surprised. I never see Eudora crash, and I use it constantly. It's always
> running, continously fetching mail (3 to 400 messages a day, 75% spam) and
> doing lots of filtering. It deals with my 121 mail boxes containing some 9 or
> 10 years of email quite easily. The only single way I know of to crash Eudora
> is to use John Delacour's MainPersonality Plug-in and then change the
> personality on an incoming message. Might you be using that, or some other
> third-party plug-in that does something funky? (I've been using a few other
> third-party plug-ins, like SuperSleek and Personality Headers for many years
> without any problem.)

No third party plug-ins for Eudora (very similar to my treatment of Mac OS
X, which is quite "clean.")

The crashing is down quite a bit, but now and then Eudora still goes away.
I can't describe circumstances, since recently I haven't been aware of what
I did.

I suppose the age of the Eudora Settings file could have something to do
with the problem...the same file has been around for a long time for company
mail, and a file with even older origins was in use with the mailing list
instance. Some bit rot might have set in.

>
>> and also got tired of restarting Eudora to use a different
>> configuration.
>
> I suppose you might have to under some cirumstances, but you are aware of its
> "Personalities" concept, right? And that you can change each x-eudora-setting
> on a per-personality basis?

First, I don't want to keep the--few these days--messages I save from
mailing lists in the same mailbox collection as the company mail. The two
sorts of messages have different archival and destruction requirements, and
searching is easier if they aren't mixed.

Second, this somewhat "just grew"...during my transition from the 7300 to
the dual 533 (now running Mac OS X exclusively, but earlier running OS 9
when I wanted stability), I did company work on the 7300 and personal stuff
on the dual 533. And I didn't want to bother integrating the two instances
when everything moved to Mac OS X on the dual 533.

  --John

> I have recently started a workflow that reduces the CPU overhead of
> always leaving Entourage running namely, running Pine in X11 to my
> ...
> This has freed up a good deal of processor time on my PowerBook but it
> leads me to wonder are there any happy Pine users among TidBITS Talk
> users?

Or Mutt. :) If you like Pine, and are willing to spend a little time tweaking
the config files to get it working how you want it, then you'll love
Mutt. Everything is just one or two keypresses away and it is *fast*.

I answered "other" in the poll since I spend the vast majority of my emailing
time using Mutt with IMAP. The only time I ever have to fire up another IMAP
client is to view an attachment, and that's just because I'm too lazy to
write a script that automatically saves the attachment on my desktop (or
wherever.)

Though Mutt may not be an option for those who enjoy their GUI clients, for
those who have dabbled in Pine, it's worth considering:

http://www.mutt.org/

Take care,
David

--
David McLaughlin

I can't even remember what I ended up choosing! I use Entourage mainly for testing, and purging a spam-filled DSL account. I use Mail.app for testing, and for mac.com mail. Webmail for domain-related mail. My "real" email account (snobs, have a party) is an AOL account. But do I use the full AOL application to check it? No, I use the excellent AOL Communicator, which bears some similarities to the Netscape it came from. So would that have been the AOL choice or the Mozilla choice? Or Other? ::sigh:: That's the problem with surveys...

I have been an enthusiastic use of E-Mailer for ages. I have it running on an older Powerbook which also runs Timbuktu. By using this combination I can have my e-mail, incoming and outgoing from numerous accounts: internal LAN accounts, used for reminder messages and sysadmin stuff; AOL accounts; and external pop accounts all one place, and access it all from fancier newer machines. Applescripting in E-Mailer has allowed me to cherry pick features I hear about in other E-Mail clients and write a little script to provide similar functionality. I use Timbuktu extensively and having one place to go to look at any and all my E-Mail is great. I typically leave messages on the server for a couple of weeks so I can use webmail if I need to. Once in a while a spam message is so malformed that E-Mailer gets upset and webmail can save the day.

Slightly off-topic: The combination with Timbuktu allows continued use of many older apps, typically running on older, now cheap-to-replace hardware with awesome amounts of memory for the vintage application. I still use even older hardware with systems 7.5.5, 8.1 and 8.6 because they still do a great job at what they've "always" done and the network and TB2 glue it all together.

http://netopia.com/software/products/tb2/

VNC can perform similar tricks of screen sharing but performance and feature set is poor compared to Timbuktu and my use of Timbuktu and owning multiple licenses of it pre-dates VNC.

Cheers,

-Dick