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.
Hide this

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team


Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread


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

    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.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

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

    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.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

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

    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.

    link to this | view in chronology ]


Follow Techdirt
Essential Reading
Techdirt Deals
Report this ad  |  Hide Techdirt ads
Techdirt Insider Discord

The latest chatter on the Techdirt Insider Discord channel...

Loading...
Recent Stories

This site, like most other sites on the web, uses cookies. For more information, see our privacy policy. Got it
Close

Email This

This feature is only available to registered users. Register or sign in to use it.