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Next Generation Mail Clients Reviewed
kreide writes "E-mail is the 'killer app' of the Internet; an enormous number of messages are exchanged every day, and while web-based mail has become very popular in recent years, many people still prefer the added speed and flexibility of a mail client application. In this review I compare the next generation of the most popular e-mail clients, including Evolution, KMail, Opera and Mozilla, and their usability in dealing with large number of messages."
isn't this kind of like reviewing the state of pop music without touching on britney spears, justin timberlake, beyonce, and michelle branch?
I hardly think email is the next 'killer app.' I get about 100 spams a day, and about 1 legitimate message every few weeks. Nowadays, virtually all of my communication is done over IM.
it is pretty nice, why did it not get reviewed? Is this site biased or something?
This is not a "next-generation" email client review if it does not include Microsoft Outlook 2003. Outlook 2003 boasts a great number of features and usability enhancements over Outlook 2002/XP. By including an older version of Outlook the author is skewing the comparison significantly!
Feel free to mod me down as a troll, but the author isn't being honest with the community. Open-source folks will be better off knowing what's in the current version of commercial products, not the older versions.
Check out our infosecurity industry blog: http://securitymusings.com/
Is called mutt...
RTFA! They review Outlook.
What? According to the overview evolution 1.5.2 doesn't support mail importing. That's a bit odd since my 1.4.5 does support it.
Panther's Mail.app is by far the most usable, configurable mail application I've ever used. It's got all the usability and more of Outlook 2k3 without the high probability of having your computer trashed by virii.
I just ditched my email client, I'm 100% on openwebmail now.
I'm a roaming contractor, so the alternative was trying to manage email clients at several locations, and constantly finding that something (address books, mail archives, etc..) was out of sync.
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
I didn't find anything spectacular about any of them that would make them something I could call "next-generation". Perhaps "up-in-coming versions" or something...
E-mail is NOT the killer app of the Internet. I have used plenty of different email clients and they all work the same. It is just as important as any other Internet communication device (IM, IRC, whatever).
In order to get a feel for how each mail client handles daily tasks, I conducted my review by performing a number of tasks:
Download a reasonably large amount of messages, about 2100 in total
This is funny to me. I consider myself a "regular" computer/Internet user. I don't see the need to download 2100 messages as part of my "daily tasks".
Why is new mail notification (on 3 of the 5) "Audio Only"? I much prefer not having sound and just having a popup notification (or a small blurb come up):
[10:08] > From: Kitch@removed.org
[10:08] To: Bill
[10:08] Subject: Re: ok.
I guess I am old fashioned...
I also find it strange that only a single one (KMail) supports Maildir. The rest are mbox. I thought Maildir was the future?
Just my worthless review of a worthless review,
The author gives his justification for not including Outlook 2003 in the FAQ at the end of the aarticle.
The main justification being that:
Outlook 2002 is fully featured enough to compete, and
Most users with windows will be using outlook 2002 so it is a useful reference.
Get down of that high horse buddy and relax a little
Evolution is kind of quiet lately; I haven't seen new versions for some time. Besides, so far, it does not include some of the nifty features, like bayesian spam filtering, other email clients do.
There does not seem to be a roadmap for it, either. Maybe Thunderbird is in the future for me.
It's just a BloJJ
The problem with Outlook is that it is not an email client, but rather an Exhange client. For example, there are plenty of simple IMAP functions Outlook does not support (at least in Office XP version that I mucked around with) such as saving sent mail to an IMAP folder instead of an Exchange folder (This can be hacked to work using a rule, but Outlook in itself cannot do this out of the box).
http://www.rayn.net . Funny. Stuff.
Yeah, all this spam is killing me, that's for sure.
:-D
But having said that, I think email (non-spam, even) probably has been using more bandwidth (speaking globally and through the years) than any other form of internet usage, at least until p2p came along, so I think email has earned its "killer" title.
And now, I'll go read the article!
"Good news, everyone!"
If this is for "Next Generation", there's no reason to include Outlook Express since Microsoft is stopping development on it.
-- Stu
/. ID under 2,000. I feel old now.
Why doesn't Evolution support importing mailboxes? That seems really weird, not to mention the first feature that will leave an impression on the end-user. If I'm using an email client, and it does a sloppy/nonexistent job of importing my old mail, I'll just stick to whatever I'm using, amazing features or not.
There is no review of Pegasus or Eudora
"For every email sent, 2 pornographic images are viewed/downloaded"
Well, yes, it doesn't support virtual folders in the way that others implement it.
However there is an option called "Current View" (in "View") which allows you to see your inbox in a number of different ways. For example: by sender, by followup flag, by conversation, past seven days.
In addition, you can create and define your own custom views. So if I want to see all messages with the word "fish" in them, with one or more attachements, where I've been cc'ed and posted in the last week, then I can do so.
Which sounds very similar to virtual folders to me.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Gnus in emacs is perhaps the most configurable email client ever. For dealing with massive amounts of email it is especially suitable. It treats email like it was news. It basically arranges your email into newsgroups and does things like sorting messages based on headers/content into the right buckets and expire old mails. I do not know how I could receive, e.g., the linux-kernel mailing list without gnus.
Yoghurt
E-mail is the 'killer app' of the Internet
Actually, the internet has had several killer apps that kept the boom going:
a) Communication: This includes IM's and email. In the early days it was mostly email.
b) PR0N: Actually, it's been around since the early days of the internet. Heck, I remember it was a big part of BBS's before I got on the 'net
c) Games: This really hit when TCP/IP games became popular over the internet. Less need to lug your PC over to a friends' for a LAN party, and you mom can play solitaire with your aunt in another country
d) Music: I know a lot of people that subscribed to high speed just to get supposed "free" music.
Email is perhaps, however, one of the "killer apps" that has suffered the most during its time online. Games have their botters/hackers, pr0n has its misleading popups, and music has its Britneys, but by far SPAM has become one of the larger unfixed problems so far (patched, perhaps, but not fixed)
As someone else mentioned, Microsoft's current mail client is not Outlook XP, it's currently Outlook 2003.
There are also several innaccuracies in his review of the product.
1.) Outlook does indeed support emoticons. Use Word as your default text editor in Outlook.
2.)You CAN forward attachments, both in line and otherwise...
3.) Outlook can do key binding... it's under Options, Customize.
4.) I've been creating and managing mail lists in Outlook since Outlook 98...
Microsoft has already stated that they've stopped updating their Outlook Express software. It wouldn't make sense to classify it as "next-generation" when it's not going to have one.
The ability to filter incoming mail based on the existence (or lack of) of the sender's e-mail address in my Contact database. This applies to both Outlook and Evo.
All belly aching aside, I'm planning on employing a white list of valid e-mailers some time this year. For me at least, the promise of 'anybody' communicating via e-mail is dead.
Sylpheed, judged "not next generation enough" by the reviewer, enables me to compose in a custom konsole/xterm/rxvt in Vim, or Gvim -- a capability that makes it the only usuable GUI client IMHO.
For example:
As part of the stat breakdown in the boxed chart in the review (did you read the article? Please read the article..), Outlook is flagged as not having full index searching.
To wit, `full index searching` has a superscript and is described thusly:
This is true but only half accurate -- in an Exchange environment it is completely possible to enable full text indexing of everything on the Exchange server. It just isn't usable on your home system as a standalone internet email client.
Even if you could use full text indexing at home, in a POP3/IMAP environment
Assuming you do IMAP and keep most of your data on the server the argument becomes, `I don't want to have to read/download everything to find a single message`. The counter argument is simply, `Where do you think you're gonna keep your full text index? On your ISP's system?`
Anyway, full text index searching isn't something I see as viable for a home platform -- and if you're talking about in a business or enterprise setting, Outlook does support it - through Exchange Server.
Are you daft? Exchange 5.5, 2000 and 2003 support IMAP and POP3. Funny how my linux box running KMail connects just fine to my Exchange 2003 server at the office... I must be doing something strange!
Poppycock. The only reason the author didn't include Outlook 2003 was because he didn't have access to it. While this is perfectly acceptable, the little blurb in the FAQ (before the author admits not having access) is pure BS. When writing an article about the "next generation of email clients" there is no justification for comparing the latest version of everything to an old version of Microsoft's product. This is, indeed, unfair and misleading.
The Opera M2 client is what I use every day for newsgroups, mailing lists, pop3 mail, imap mail.
I know it inside out... the review makes two mistakes in the matrix of features.
Firstly Opera does have both audio and visual mail notification.
Secondly Opera Mail does have the ability to assign keyboard shortcuts of your choice.
Thirdly it does support emoicons.
If the reviewer gets so much wrong about Opera then there is no telling how many other mistakes he has made.
Mozilla's support for IMAP is OK, but to not see Mulberry on this list is a big shame! It is the best GUI IMAP client currently available. Outlook's IMAP is HORRIBLE & the Kmail & Opera aren't quite there yet either.
For what it is worth, I actually use PINE (which is an even better IMAP client than mulberry). It is a shame not to see some very good text-based clients such as pine and mutt in this comparison as well.
If you edit a lot of files, it's worth it to learn how to use vi or emacs. Likewise, if you get a lot of email, it's worth it to learn how to use a powerful and effective email client. There's no reason a program should be viewed as limited just because it doesn't require a mouse.
Text-based MUAs such as Mutt are still (IMO) more effective at dealing with large numbers of messages. They do have a learning curve, but you can cut through the masses much more efficiently. External programs are called for HTML, images, encryption, etc. in the Unix tradition (and even Microsoft uses an external HTML viewer). For those of you who edit a lot of text too, Mutt even calls an external editor for composing messages.
No, they're not for everyone, or perhaps even most people. However, my father is an auto mechanic working as a shop supervisor for UMBC. He doesn't like PCs very much, but he asked me to "set up PINE" (meaning an SSH client) on a new machine that the campus IT staff had set up for him with Netscape 7's email client. He's on some high-volume lists, and it's just too slow to use a GUI client.
For the record, I do prefer Mozilla to w3m, because I find it to be faster for most tasks (even for freshmeat work, where I have to edit a lot of text in Mozilla's editor versus the ability to use Vim in w3m). I also use GAIM, and used Pan back when I downloaded large quantities of fansubs. But email is basically dealing with a lot of text which sometimes has other stuff, and for that, I find text-based to be the way to go.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
And Outlook is open source and available for UNIX platforms? Yes, I know that Outlook / OE are popular, but it is kind of a shame that Eudora was omitted, given that the review was to cover the Windows environment. Unlike Outlook, it is possible to configure Eudora to avoid some of the security mis-features of Windows. (For example, you can disable Microsoft's HTML rendering engine.) The reviewer missed an opportunity to provide a little education. (BTW, I am sure that there are other good mail clients; I mention Eudora because I'm familiar with it.)
Well, for one thing, Outlook runs only on Windows and many of us here do not run this OS. If you are on Windows, then feel free to use Outlook, even though personally I can't see why anyone would want to run it unless he has to connect to an Exchange server.
While it's true that Outlook is becoming more secure, having the possibility to script a mail client is not the best of ideas if you ask me. I prefer to stay clear of script-enabled email client since I don't ever need that feature. (I know, it's disabled by default now in Outlook)
Also, outlook isn't free. Which is irrelevant if your boss pays for your software but kinda sucks at home. Unless you copy it of course...
IP Therefore I am.
I can't believe people mention Eudora. The focus is clearly on next-generation email clients. Although Eudora, Pegasus, etc. were popular in the 90's, they haven't made any progress the last few years, and are burdened by old code. And we all know old code becomes harder and harder to maintain, until it grinds to a total halt. I would rather use a brand new client, preferably with Linux (java) ports available than stuff that was converted from a windows 3.11 version to a windows 95 version almost 10 years ago.
I'd like to revise this law and phrase it as:
So, the next real "killer" internet application is clearly a mail client which can play MP3 files.
There is a definite lack of predefined fields in the address book - no place to store phone numbers or addresses, for example. It does have a feature that lets you add ad-hoc fields (user attributes) to the contact's record, but there isn't a way to make all the contacts have the same add-on fields without defining them for each individual contact. It is also capable of using vCards, but it only seems to get the name and email address out of them, ignoring all the other info.
If it wasn't for the poor address book, I'd be using it on my Windows box as well as my Linux system.
"This just smacks of zealotry."
Zealotry : Mindlessly supporting a group, company, individual, product, or concept without regard for facts or opposing views.
"With MS's recent drive for security, it's probably significantly more secure and robust too."
Pot meet kettle.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
While looking at your Inbox,
Tools | Options | first tab is Preferences | E-mail Options.
Area called `On Replies and Forwards`. Dropdown list called `When forwarding a message`. Options are:
Strike out `is used` and write in `can be used` -- I routinely disable Word as my email editor because I don't want everything Word can to do happen to my email (such as substituting graphical smileys for the universal
The fonts and formatting all work splendidly in Rich Text mode, which is 200% less suck-tastic than HTML mail.
While composing an email -
View | BCC Field
Damn, I know that's hard to find.
Unfortunately for the reviewer, I find Outlook remarkably easy to use, and always have. The reviewer's inability to find these simple, basic pre-installed options in Outlook calls into question the thoroughness of the review of any product listed. I'm just catching these because I happen to use Outlook fairly often.
Under the review for Outlook, the author says, "Blind carbon copy (BCC) does not seem to be supported at all." However, Outlook does
support Bcc. Just like in Evolution, if you go to View->Bcc Field, it will show the Bcc field below the Cc field. If you do not have the Bcc Field present (to conserve screen real estate), when you create a new e-mail, if you click to "To..." button, a "Select Names" window pops up and allows you to enter e-mail addresses in the To, Cc, and Bcc fields.
I don't know about you guys, but last time I checked not all email clients supported all the AUTH protocols out there.
I know that Kmail does a pretty good job of supporting most of them (PLAIN, LOGIN, GASSPI, KRB5, etc)
Sunny Dubey
The fact that "deleting" does not shield the user from the IMAP concept of marking for deletion. I am unable to move many of my users to an IMAP-based mail implementation because Outlook doesn't correctly use the metaphor!
(Thunderbird, on the other hand, sets up a virtual "trash" folder, which is really just posts that have been marked for deletion-- that's the way it should work!)
"Mail import: Evolution can only import from UNIX mbox files and some older versions of Netscape. This makes migration from Windows clients such as Outlook Express problematic to say the least. The easiest solution might in fact be using KMail to migrate the mail to mbox format and then import it into Evolution."
For me the easiest route to getting people out of outlook express and into any open source email client is to open an IMAP email account for them at fastmail.fm or runbox. Then I setup the account under outlook and move all the email to that account. Since IMAP is server-based, they can switch to Linux and all their email is just there.
Then, they can do one of two things. If they are moving permanently to Linux, move all of their emails to the local mbox from the IMAP one and set up their pop service with whoemver they have as their email provider. Or if they are double-booting, continue with the IMAP setup, which allows them to email from both sides of their computing world and makes the transition to full-time Linux user easier.
Pragmatism as an ideology is not particularly pragmatic in the long term. Keep it in mind when you dismiss Free Software
I'm not a microsoft support but I think it is a little remiss not to include the next generation of Outlook in your review. It seems to be the "most popular" client everywhere I've ever worked.
:
SIGH. About six comments are moderated 3 or better with this exact same sentiment. So not only did the posters not read the article, neither did the moderators. While you can argue that his logic is flawed or that he could have included Outlook EXPRESS, he specifically states
The only reason Outlook was even included was to serve as a reference with what is commonly available for the majority of users (which still run Windows unfortunately) today.
Using the latest Office 2003 would not have done most of them any good, as upgrading can cost hundreds of dollars (or more!), and might not be an option for some time. After reading the review they can, however, immediately decide it is time to try out one of the alternatives, several of which are multi platform.
Also, I only had Office XP at hand when writing the review, which only helps to better illustrates my point I think.
ALSO note that the author seems to be focusing on Linux mail clients (or at least AVAILABLE for Linux), which Outlook is NOT (AFAIK...).
having the possibility to script a mail client is not the best of ideas if you ask me.
Perhaps having a mail client that supports scripting which someone else can trigger is the problem, not scripting per se. Apple's Mail, for example, fully supports AppleScript but it won't trigger a script on receipt of a mail message. AppleScripts have to be activated by a user.
Of course, there are dumb users who trigger their own infections by clicking on attachments without checking, but the same goes for a file loaded on a floppy disk, CD or any other source - not the fault of the mail client.
Having a scriptable mail client can be very useful if you get a lot of spam or need to do a lot of fancy filtering.
"This is why men never share their feelings; because women always remember." -Just Shoot Me.
The chart in the article shoes mozilla not having visual notifcations of new mail.
I am using thunderbird 0.5 and if you goto
tools/options
and look for show an alert, make sure checked.
ta-da
Well, I'm glad that someone else who knows how to use Outlook saw the flaws in the article.
I e-mailed the author, and pointed out some of the more obvious problems with his review.
Yet another case of the the anti-Microsoft world spreading their own version of FUD. And because they are not part of the legitimate media establishment, they can do a really shoddy job of journalism, and never print a retraction, or correction. In fact, their readership would be disappointed if they ever did correct their mistakes, because their readership does NOT want to hear anything positive about a Microsoft product.
No reason to lie.
I've posted this before, but for me, particularly as i am applying for jobs sending CV's off every five minutes, etc, this shows that it is often the simple things in life that really make a difference. I recently upgraded to KDE 3.2 , and recieved a pop-up dialog that actually made me smile :))
....
Kmail Dialog
(its KDE3.2 with Aqua Icons, Baghira and clever configuration btw)
nick
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
I've tried most of the graphical Windows clients and nothing beats The Bat for me. The filters are the real killer, especially filtering on groups into set folders with different notifications for each.
Thunderbird is almost there and I'm guessing sometime in the next year it'll be good enough for me to move to it.
There's a small thing I find really annoying with Outlook, OE and Mozilla mail (which I have to use at work). When you set up a mail rule to mark certain messages as "read", the little icon in the task bar still pops up to say that you have "unread" messages when new messages arrive. So you go to your inbox, and of course all the messages are "read" (like you want). In OE, to get the little "unread messages" icon to dissappear, you have to click on a read message, mark it as "unread", click on it again and mark it "read"!
So the program does something like this:
- check mail and find new messages
- pop up the "unread messages" icon
- check rules and mark messages unread
(thus leaving you with a misleading "unread messages" icon)
What they should do is this:
- check mail and find new messages
- check rules and mark messages unread
- pop up the "unread messages" icon if there are still unread messages
This person has obviously never used Outlook in a corporate environment. At several jobs, I lived in Outlook. All of the features: tasks, calendars, scheduling, even journaling are *EXTREMELY* useful!
That being said, Outlook is NOT a bare bones mail client. If he wanted to compare the MS mail client, that would be Outlook Express.
Also, why didn't he review any good closed source clients? This seems to be a silly OSS vs. MS thing. If it was a real review, he would have at LEAST needed to include Eudora and Pegasus, both of which have been around for ages (much longer than any of the ones he reviewed, in fact).
as for 'next generation' mail clients, I continue to think web based clients should be considered. why continue to spread the burden of email from server -> client, when a web based client only views mail on the server, and doesn't have to transmit/store it.
with clients such as Squirrelmail and Horde/IMP, it seems that this would be the path more in line with the current thinking. I use Squirrelmail, and it does (almost) everything I want. What it doesn't do can be added via modules, or via coding of your own modules (which I'm working on now).
P
free ipod and free gmail!
The point is that many people do not have access to it and the reviewer is a good example of that. The email clients got reviewed because they were accessible, both to the reviewer and (most of) us.
Actually, IBM Research is working on Reinventing Email, or ReMail. http://www.research.ibm.com/remail/index.html It includes some pretty neat features, which other clients aught to adopt.
With all respect, I doubt any of these email clients belong to the next generation, they are rather of the current generation. The next generation includes Chandler from the OSA Foundation.
There is a single feature of Outlook 2003 that I fell in love with. I use Pine and SquirrelMail (in that order, depending if ssh is available to me) for my own e-mail, but at work we are on a Windows domain and have an Exchange server.
.pst so they'd have quicker access. The problem is that synchronizing a 100MB .pst with perhaps 3 new messages is both painstakingly slow and unreliable. I fought with this for months.
I am responsible for 3 sites throughout the metropolitan area, and have some users who have to do work from home. Before me, they would connect through the VPN and either use Windows Offline Files or Terminal Services to access their work. Their Outlook 2000 client (2002/XP is no better) would read every message from the server every time it even thought you might want to see that message. The whole thing was horribly slow.
I quickly replaced this situation with Unison to synchronize their My Documents folders, including a
When we opened up our third site in the city, we got new computers that came with Office 2003. I asked myself, "Self, why did Microsoft bring us a new version of Office just a year after the last version was new, with no new features other than the bubblegum interface?" In setting up their e-mail access, however, I stumbled across Outlook 2003's ability to synchronize per-message, and the question then was "Self, why did Microsoft screw me for so many months with previous versions of Outlook, when this is so easy?"
I don't have a lot of pro-Microsoft testimonials to give, and Outlook 2003 has a few really obnoxious features, too, but for its ability to synchronize with an Exchange server, I say "Thank you, Microsoft."
1) Opera DOES have a non-audio mail notification. I have sound turned off, and when mail comes in, I get a little box in the bottom left hand corner of the screen that says how many messages have arrived. I'm still using Opera 7.23.
2) Outlook XPs version of 'threading' is kind of crappy, in my opinion.
3) Why do all the open source email clients look exactly like Outlook? I've never particularily liked that view of email. Can't anyone think of anything better?
4) I use mutt, Mail.app (OSX) and Opera as my main mail clients. Mutt is still the most feature-rich mail client that I've ever used, inability to display HTML and images inline notwithstanding (and most of the time, I like it better that way.) Mail.app under OSX is quite nice too, though I don't like the way that it won't check IMAP servers automatically when it checks your main Inbox. I always have to syncronize my folders. Also, it should display the number of new messages that you have in total in all of your folders (excluding the spam folder) if you want it to.
5) I haven't used Outlook 2003 yet, but Outlook XP is excessively annoying. It doesn't do anything the standard way, as near as I can tell. Threading, quoting, replying - it's all terrible. I hate the fact that text email isn't default.
Our firm is discussing the possibility of setting up a "caller ID" type of system.
In other words, for each person who has an e.mail account with us, they would get a message saying "such and such wants to send you e.mail, about this topic. Do you accept?"
If so, the e.mail goes through and the person can be authenticated in the future. If not, they can be blocked, either once, or permanently.
It could serve as an in-between system until something better is thought out, or it might function on a permanent basis. Still doing a small test run of it.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
Let's see how the old generation compares:
:-)
New mail notification: Yes.
Encryption: Yes
Follow-ups: Probably not. I have ever used the build-in calendar.
Forward attached/Inline: Yes
Write HTML mail: No
Multiple accounts: Yes
Customizable keybindings: Yes, extremely
Full index search: No, requires an add-on (nnir)
Advanced searching: Yes
IMAP search: Don't know, I don't use IMAP.
Search folders: Yes
Spam filter: No build in spam filter. Good support for external spam filters, and good general filtering ability.
Handle mailing lists: Yes, if I understand it correctly.
Do not download mail rules: Don't know.
Labels for e-mail: No, not if they are talking about RMAIL style labels.
Create filter from message: No
Emoticons: Yes
LDAP: No
Message threading: Yes
Mail storage format: mbox, babyl, mh, usenet, and more...
... the ability to use vi as my mail editor. This is why I stuck with Mutt. I would love to use a GUI to naviguate my mail, but I spend much more time composing mail so that is what I decided to optimize. I have been told that you can coax Kmail into using the Kvim Kpart for mail composing (this K- naming convention is getting ridiculous ...), but never got around to try it. Well, I guess I could use both a GUI for navigating my mail and Mutt for composition, but that would get cumbersome ...
I also wish somebody would embbed vim in Web browser. Editing in those damn HTML textarea is a fscking pain !
:wq
I find all this focus on easy-of-use and simplicity boring. I hate it whem computers become so simple that my grandmother can use them.
We posted almost exactly the same comment.
I use mh as well as sylpheed-claws. Any graphical client I use at home has to support mh-style folders, because I often read mail remotely via ssh.
I used to use mutt, but I found that between it and the graphical application I was using, they kept stepping on each others toes. With mh, there are no lock files and no toes to step on.
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
Sorry, but I really don't think that HTML bloated email is next gen.
It pisses me off to waste time understanding how people are quoting emails in order to find what they actually wrote. I especially like people who quote everything and then insert replies with a supposed different color. Very convenient when I answer with mutt.
It pisses me off to fight with Mozilla Thunderbird in order to remove decorative bloat with pictures added to every mail sent by my boss.
It pisses me off to removely download a 10 Mb large email through a 128Kb link just to see that it's a BMP screenshot send through outlook instead of writing text.
It pisses me off to receive mail with no subject. And then people reply to it and the subject becomes "Re: Tr: Tr: Re: Re: Tr:".
It pisses me off to receive mail that was actually a "reply to" a message that was 2 years old and that has nothing to do with the previous thread.
It pisses me off to receive mails whose content is in the subject with an empty body.
It pisses me off to receive fully quoted emails, including attachments (even when it's BMP screenshots) just when the real text added by the sender is "ok".
The next generation email is probably when people will respect the netiquette again.
{{.sig}}
I also agree; this list is "current generation", not "next generation". The IBM/Lotus team has shown some truly innovative work with Remail. Take a look at the screenshots. FOSS email developers should take a look at this instead of Outlook when adding features to their email clients...
what's wrong with it???
how about the simple fact that it enable's the Dill-weeds in marketing to make a "outlook stationary" that is almost 1 meg in size and causes the email servers to fricking choke as the 1.2 million employees stupidly follow the morons in marketing and use it.
HTML email is the stupidest thing ever created, but how outlook does it by having all the graphics IN the fricking email is a magnitude worse.
There is one reason that 90% of the sysadmins on this planet absolutely and utterly HATE outlook.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
First, you can't sort email from an IMAP mailbox into another folder. Yes, really. POP sorting works well, but if you use IMAP, then you have to manually move your mail or use server-side sorting.
Second, KDE needs a real LDAP backend. Evolution's LDAP client is fine - you can add, edit, and delete entries as your permissions allow. KAddressBook will only let you search for entries. I maintain a small LAN and I would love for all users to be able to sync their Palms with an OpenLDAP addressbook so that we don't have to push changes to each individual user.
If KMail can get these straightened out, I'd almost consider switching from Gnus. Almost.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Hey! What about OSX's email client? It rocks! And it does some pretty slick backflips as well.....drag a file to icon, it launches an email, file attached. Select some text, hit reply, up comes reply w/ ONLY that selected text quoted... Plus less of a chance of virus emails, to say the least.... I love my Powerbook... skeezix
--I do what I can, I work in the dark.
With all these folks going on about how great Outlook 2003 is, no one mentions the price.
If you are an academic, you can get Office 2003 fairly cheap, but for the average shmo that has to buy at retail at bestbuy/amazon, $275 to upgrade old version of office, and $430 for a new one.
I can't think of any features in Office 2003 that are so good I'd give up Star Office and Mozilla Mail and pay the Microsoft tax.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
For what it is worth, I actually use PINE (which is an even better IMAP client than mulberry). It is a shame not to see some very good text-based clients such as pine and mutt in this comparison as well.
I second this. I've never been so productive with e-mail as I was with Pine, thanks to simple keyboard shortcuts and an uncluttered text-based interface. It even stored your sent mail into named folders automatically at the end of each month, something that I've yet to see a 'second-generation' mail client do.
As Pine was basically a Unix client, work has been underway to bring it to the PC platform in the form of PC-Pine. However, this never really worked well, integrated horribly with Windows, never supported POP3 without extra add-ons and workarounds, and development seems to have stalled on it.
I think the moral of this story is 'less is more' - apart from good spam filtering, the basically requirements of e-mail haven't changed since 1998. Who needs all gimmicky functionalities these nextgen clients offer? Do Virtual folders, graphical emoticons and a built-in RSS reader really make anybody more productive?
---- scrm
I recently tried to use other mail/news clients that don't make people look funny at you, but quite frankly, they all sucked in comparison, and I switched back. Even without the fancy configuration options, I could not find one that was as usable for reading a lot of mailing lists and newsgroups. I could not find one where I can easily sort mailing lists and newsgroups from various servers into subfolders by topic, or where I can set up the default spellchecking language per group, or easily create scoring rules globally or per topic/group, let alone fix up the mess people create with Outlook Express so that I can actually read them without getting a headache. Actually, it is hard to find programms that let you treat mailing lists and newsgroups and other similar things (like slashdot, which Gnus supports) in the same way - as if I would care about the transport method used! Some programms have some of the features I want, but not one of them had them all.
This thing is really the prototypical Emacs-based application, ugly, hard to learn, but amazingly powerful, flexible and easy to use. Not to mention the huge community of hackers that will implement all features found in other mailers in a small elisp snippet anyway :-)
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
lesser than pine, lesser than elm, lesser than GNUs and certainly lesser than the stoopid clients compared - Evolution, Kmail, Opera, Mozilla and (hehe) Outlook. Ofcourse, like most other happy mutt users ("happy" is redundant though), I have installed, configured, used and finally uninstalled them all (thanks god its all over). Outlook (hehe) is an exception, it automatically got uninstalled when I deleted windows.
...
Some of the reasons why I hate all the non-mutt clients:
1. WINDOWS BASED: excellent virus support (is that a feature or a bug?) + (correct me if I'm wrong) hardly any fetchmail / procmail / mbox support. BTW, these are not the only reasons for hating (hehe) outlook
2. GUI BASED: 'normally' heavy on system resources + un-necessary dependence on mouse + need to have an Xserver if you wish to check your mails from your colleague's windows machine (who is another building).
3. Text Based: either not as fast or not as configurable as mutt.
- Mutt loads my 9,000 messages (approx.) mbox faster than pine (haven't compared elm/gnus).
- Searching for a particular messages takes me atleast 1/10th the time on mutt because it allows localizing searches and sorting results. Don't ever challenge any mutt user on this one.
- Pine/Elm are not colorful, which is a very usable feature I believe.
- Threading. Don't know if Pine/Elm have it (please correct me if I'm wrong)?
- Mutt allows keybindings for almost everything. So, when I press F7, I see all messages from my friends; Esc F7 -> everything except from my friends; F8 -> Friends + Family; F9 ->
Reasons why I sometimes hate Mutt:
1. doesn't have news support
2. doesn't work if my keyboard is not plugged in (i.e. solely with a mouse)
3. no group object model (yet to be invented)
Someone should do the study again.
v==hal if
I'm surprised that Outlook Express isn't one of the clients that is reviewed.
Yes, Outlook Express is full of problems, and isn't that great at protecting the end user from viruses, BUT, Outlook is used probably more than any of email client.
By reviewing OE, you can show users (of Windows) the faults of OE, that there are better email clients, and they do exist on Linux, which may give the user 1 more reason to end up ditching Windows.
Personally this is my problem from switching completely over to Linux, I don't feel like spending all of my time finding and testing out programs that are comparable to what I use on Windows.
I did not include Eudora, even though the latest version does include unique features such as a Content Concentrator, Contextual Filing, MoodWatch and Email Usage Stats, as it is both closed source and not available for any UNIX platforms.
That said, Eudora seems to run just fine on my Mach kernal, BSD-based system.
It is misleading though: In this review I compare the next generation of the most popular e-mail clients, including Evolution, KMail, Opera and Mozilla...
As I understand it, the most popular email clients are Outlook, Lotus, and Eudora. He means "the most popular e-mail clients for Linux... oh, and an old version of Outlook for comparison".
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
He left out a BIG feature to compare: blocking attachments. I'm a Thunderbird user, and this is one thing that T'bird lacks unfortunately.
Scott in NC
I might want to an audio notification--but I might want to first check if (a) I'm sleeping, (b) I'm having a higher priority meeting/phone call, (c) vary the audio notification depending on the email, (d) flash the lights if I'm deaf YIC!, (e) page me, (f) ???
Granted if the program is open source, I can do what I want, but that's frequently too much information. I just want documented hooks, not a whole parts list.
Of course, this was a user review.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I know this is a bit off topic, but how do /. user recommend to keep old emails? The answer to this question is a big part fo choosing the mail client (at least for me).
I have a ton of old email I like to keep and so far resides on IMAP server. The trouble is that is approaching my 100MB limit and that's all text emails - no big attachments. Most is standard encoding, but a few use alterantive encodings, though no 2bit characters.
I am running Outlook 2002 at home and there are two things I don't like about it:
1. PST support: The interface for setting up the location of your PST file was more intuitive and straightforward in Outlook 2000. They "softened" the interface up too much making more unecessary steps in saying where you want your PST file to be located if it is stored in a nondefault location.
2. Rules not flexible enough: The biggest annoyance with setting up Rules was that I would set specific rules from specific domains to go to specific folders (i.e delete the files (spam is an example)) but the New Message flag which I like to have for normal messages would not disappear. Without getting into VBA this wasn't possible. I think they need to become more flexible in what you can do with rules.
Now SpamAssasin is the shiznit for identifying Spam but all it would do is mark the email as Spam at that point I would have to use a rule to get rid of it. (Is this better in Outlook 2k3?)
I actually kicked Mozilla-based clients to the curb after it completely messed up my IMAP inbox when the connection was severed abnormally (pre-UPS on my main workstation) due to 100 year old wiring in my house. It would essentially hold on to messages marked for deletion, but slap subject lines from un-deleted messages on them. So, when I'd open the inbox, I'd get tons of redundant subject lines and have to open each to see which was the imposter before deleting.
When this happened several times, I, too switched to PINE and all of my fond memories of commandline email came back. I can leave my hands on the keyboard and fly through my email in no time.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
I find Outlook 2003's spam filtering spotty. Sometimes it captures a message, sometimes it doesn't.
Of importance to admins will be the fact that Outlook 2003 does not play well with some LDAP servers, and it can sometimes throw funny "errors" (warnings in reality) on IMAP mailboxes that can worry lusers.
The menu organization for configuration/customization/settings for Outlook 2003 is horrible and after using it for months I still have to click through different button paths to find the right panel.
Outlook is also a huge resource hog, but that goes without saying, given that it is a modern kitchen-sink app.
Mozilla mail seems to be a good default choice for modern email clients. The integrated spam filter catches most of the spam. Another great thing compared to other Free applications is the way it can handle non standard ports and logins for mail accounts. I have found that many programs don't support authentication for outgoing email, for instance. Couple of issues that I have found pretty annoying though.
I currently have over 2400 messages in my Inbox and about 10,000 filed away from the last 3 years. Since everything is IMAP-based, I use several e-mail clients ranging from Pine for ssh sessions, Outlook for Windows, and Evolution when at a powerful Linux machine. Most of my messages are legit...my ISP automatically filters viruses. In fact I received my first virus yesterday (the one that sends an encrypted .zip file which seems to defeat the ISP virus scanner). They also have SpamAssassin which automatically puts detected SPAM in my "caughtspam" IMAP folder.
Evolution effectively deals with my massive Inbox. I love the quick-filter feature right above the message list.
I can't sympathize with those who have unmanageable e-mail problems due to spam and viruses. Get a different ISP.
Note that my "ISP" is actually the Computer Science department. They handle over 10,000 accounts (lots of guest accounts), > 2 terrabytes of data, and manage about 500 machines (if not more due to clusters). This is all with less than 6 full-time staff and some part-time students.
Using the latest Office 2003 would not have done most of them any good, as upgrading can cost hundreds of dollars (or more!), and might not be an option for some time.
It is $109 here. That's not quite "hundreds of dollars".
Can anyone be pro-Linux and not write such uninformed dribble? Lately, I have really started to notice why a lot of people are just anti-Linux for no good reason. Everything they hear about it comes from maroons like this author.
Believe me, folks. Be responsible when posting to the web. If you act like a zealot, people will automatically and subconciously avoid things you tout on principle.
I'm actually struggling with this at the moment because I have a wife with a packrat personality who has been out of town for the last month. She has >66,000 messages, >1.3GB, of new e-mail sitting in her account on my NetBSD box (which fetches her e-mail frequently so she doesn't overflow her limit at the ISP). She also has 15GB of old messages lying about. I have so far been unable to find a client that can deal with her. She runs Windows.
I just switched her to Mozilla after it became clear that Netscape wasn't cutting the mustard. Mozilla isn't doing very well either:
I switched her to Netscape after getting tired of pulling my hair out with Outlook Express, which:
If anyone has suggestions for mail clients that can deal with someone that has a morbidly packrat personality disorder, I'm open to suggestion.
Mutt seems to be the geek favorite of mail clients. I like the sound of its flexibility, except for the fact that it doesn't support the mouse. (Mutt users cry foul at this point) but aren't Vim and Emacs doing fine at this point with mouse support? If you run Emacs from console, you get normal Emacs. If you run it from an xterm, you get XEmacs. Can we not do the same thing with Mutt?
;)
If it's already been done, then after you flame me, tell me where to look for it
The article claims that Evolution supports only mbox format. This is incorrect. I haven't been able to find a way to force maildir as the default format, but you can click on any folder and convert it to maildir format. Importing maildir format is as simple as dragging and dropping the directories into Evolution's directory.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
It looks to me like Opera's M2 already does a lot of this. M2 is definitely not current generation, since it completely breaks with traditional folders. It's one of the first to do mfull mail indexing and automatic sorting.
Clever signature text goes here.
Mozilla does more than "Audio only" - it will also pop up a small systray window at you.
It's annoying, and one of the first things that I turn off.
Edit -> Preferences -> Mail & Newsgroups -> Notifications. It's right there.. even in Moz 1.5
After having used Outlook for quite a while, I've gone through the same thing with Thunderbird. In fact, I still can't seem to switch between HTML and plaintext email composition without changing my overall composition preferences, which is buried at least four or five clicks away from the composition window.
I'm not sure if it's a config design issue as much as it is a familiarity issue. I dumped Outlook because of the unease I had with its security, and Outlook 2002's spotty compatibility with Windows XP. Thunderbird is better in some ways, but it definitely has its downsides, not the least of which is the painful configuration of multiple accounts and general preferences.
-Greg
This guy that wrote this article doesn't really have any clue. He said he is looking at the Next Generation of E-mail clients yet he is a version behind with Outlook. Also many of the things he said wasn't included in Outlook have been included in Outlook since Outlook 97. He probably didn't even look, but I don't know how you couldn't have seen them because they are right on the title bar or in the admin options.
:: Yes :: Tools > Options > E-mail Options > When Forwarding a Message > ** :: Yes :: Right Click Toolbar > Commands > Keyboard Button :: Yes :: Mailboxes are automatically indexed, as searches are done :: Yes :: It does have this I actually did it a few mins ago :: Yes :: It definitly searchs folders, but if he means a predefined pattern search Outlook 2003 does that too :: Yes :: Right click in XP and greater on a message and press create rule automatically :: No :: Okay so he got 1 out of 6 not bad.
Forward attached/Inline
Customizable keybindings
Full index search
IMAP search
Search folders
Handle mailing lists
Emoticons
All of these are based on my Outlook 2000 version so unless they removed features in a new version, which I doubt, this guy didn't put much work into this article.
He has lost all credibility with me.
I am sorry for any and all mistakes made in the article, as I also said under the "Final words" section. I will naturally correct them based on feedback (of which I have received plenty).
Great little tool...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I have tried a few mail programs, and I am forced to use Outlook at work. It is actually handy there, simply because of the scheduling aspect.
But at home, it is pine all the way. I am about speed and function. I can ssh into the box from anywhere and run the mail client locally. I don't have to wait to download any messages. The only caveat is attachments. But if I need to view them, I can save them off and download them. I would rather choose when to download something than wait for everything to download.
So my emails exist in two places - on my ISPs mail server, and on my home machine. If for some reason I can't access pine, I have webmail via my ISP. I not only have one interface, I have the same interface, and I know that there aren't various copies of my emails floating around. If I have net access, I can get PuTTY very quickly and be into my server in minutes. From anywhere. It is sweeeet.
People have laughed at me for still using Pine, but email is email. HTML in email is evil. Viruses don't harm me, I don't get flashing banners and crap. I haven't seen anything in another email client to cause me to even think about switching.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
How can he justify reviewing an unreleased version of Opera M2, but then review an older version of Outlook because most Windows users don't have it yet?
The unreleased version of Opera M2 is free (with two small Google ads) while Outlook 2003 costs a few hundred dead prime ministers. I very much doubt that the budget of this review had several hundred dead prime ministers in it.;)
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
Nothing you do is going to be fast when your mail database is that big. But the most efficient mail program I know of is the (now ancient) MH mail system. You could probably get it to run under cygwin. The problem with all other mail systems is that they're database systems, and you've got a database several orders of magnitude larger than what they're designed to work with. MH just deals in files and directories, so you get whatever the OS can do, performance-wise.
I'm amazed that no one has pointed this out yet, but the real killer app of the Internet is the World Wide Web. Before the Web, the Internet was a backwater (even though e-mail had been around for years). Once the web came along, the Internet exploded.
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
I deal with inboxes with 5,000-7,000 messages - not immense by today's standards (still boggled by the guy whose wife has 66,000 pending inbox messages) but large enough.
George Santayana keeps invading my consciousness. Most of today's mail readers are blindly taking the road that I abandoned 25 years ago. I don't want to read my mail using a database system. I want my mail to be a full-fledged member of UNIX society, not locked up inside a single application.
At RAND, we had a homebrew mail system that worked about like today's readers: mail was kept in a file, with a sidebar index file for quickly locating individual messages. It fell out of sync regularly, but on those dog-slow machines, rebuilding the index file was a coffee-break operation.
Norm Shapiro should be credited with the insight that UNIX already provided the cleanest solution to mail storage: messages are files, folders are directories. He and Bruce Borden hammered things out over about six months of conversations, then Bruce wrote the first version of the MH system over a weekend.
MH is ancient. There is no doubt about this. The original MH is as dead as T. Rex; people use NMH now. It's almost all text-only. It does have a MIME wart on the side, but just barely. If you want to use mice, scroll wheels, and other "modern" goodies you need to use a front end like EXMH.
BUT: 99.95% of all the legit email I get is text-only. "showproc" can deal with MIME mail that just asks for a different font, and EXMH does understand basic HTML. You can create MIME attachments if you need to.
And it's the skip-loader of email systems. It doesn't care if there are 8,000 messages in a folder. It just works. And it's fast.
On the Mac I use Mail.app. It does work (mostly, except when Apple is having one of its periodic days where WebDAV doesn't work, and they're in denial [nothing wrong here, move along please]). It has nice filtering features. It has threading.
It also feels like a toy. I get the feeling that if I pointed it at an 8,000-message inbox, it'd fold like a cheap suit. Certainly it'd be tough to deal with that many messages through that interface.
For the big time mail flows, I'm sticking with MH. Thanks again, Norm and Bruce.
Hey, the author knows his stuff. Didn't you see his other review where he showed Linux's 2.6 kernal blows DOS 3.0 out of the water in multitasking ability?
That would be bug 140800 ("switch for plain text/html in compose window"). You'll need to copy-n-paste the URL as Bugzilla doesn't accept referrers from Slashdot.
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
I like Evolution. But it has proven unstable, at least when using the MS/exchange plug-in (which
my employer has licensed). So we tried to get
support...
Ximian says, in effect, that you have to stop
updating your system from your distro (RedHat,
SuSE, etc.) and instead use their distribution
of gnome and other libraries exclusively.
What they actually say is that they only support
Evolution if you also Ximian Desktop, or at
least their home-brewed versions gnome, glib2, etc. available on their server (e.g., using
red-carpet). The catch: This causes massive
RPM version conflicts because their versions
use different version number/names,
and the auto-update tools provided by RedHat
or SuSE don't work any longer.
I understand their problem: They have to assume
certain updates & features in external libraries
and can't test with all possible combinations.
So they say "get everything from us". Of course,
if another application vendor did the same thing
it would be impossible to use both applications!
What do other app vendors do (e.g., in the Sun
world)? They spell out which patches or updated
library versions *from the OS vendor* must be
installed to have a supported system. I wish
Ximian did that for Evolution!
On the webmail front Ilohamail rocks! Being that it is webmail it of course doesn't have all the features of something like KMail but it has the important ones (or they're in the works). One important one that I know a lot of slashdotters need is spell check.
I still use Outlook at work because everyone else does and I need to share calendars, public folders, etc. but I use Ilohamail everywhere else. With technology like PHP look to see some webmail apps begin to close the gap in functionality.
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
I concur.
/. and was looking forward to reading the article to help me decide whether a good alternative existed.
I use Netscape (started with 4.7 and now using 7.1) as a POP mail client to access a MS Exchange mail server over VPN and have had a few minor problems with it. None that make it necessary to immediately move to another mail client, though.
In all Help Desk calls I have made about these problems I have been consistently been told to "use Outlook 2003 or Outlook Express 2003", as they "fix the reasons you're using Netscape and POP". I have also seen the mention of several alternatives here on
I was somewhat disappointed that the article only included mail clients (with the exception of Outlook XP) that would run on UNIX boxes. I'm stuck using Windows for work, no matter what my preferences may be, so wanted to see that platform covered, as well.
The article's preview didn't indicate that it was only a review of UNIX/Linux compatible mail clients. Thus I expected to see a review of *all* 'next generation' email clients -- no matter their platform. I expected the clients' platforms to be part of their review.
Or perhaps I misunderstood what the author meant by "next generation"? The term wasn't defined as to what that it meant in the article's context.
"Note that Outlook has been included for completeness, both because of its popularity and for use as a reference. I did not include Eudora, even though the latest version does include unique features such as a Content Concentrator, Contextual Filing, MoodWatch and Email Usage Stats, as it is both closed source and not available for any UNIX platforms."
From the very beginning he makes it clear that Outlook is just there for one reason - because it's the most popular/widely used client. At the same time he explains that Eudora is not included because it is closed-source and not available for any UNIX. The same goes for Outlook. It is Win32 only, and not available for UNIX.
Again, he only included it as a reference. He included what most people are using, and then listed the e-mail clients that were actually the focus of the review/overview.
He clearly states his intentions before the review begins. Did you even bother to read the review - even the introduction - before shouting about FUD or hypocrisy?
Clever signature text goes here.
If someone charges $88 for their email program, it's not going to get reviewed as often as someone who gives away free copies. Simple as that.
Actually, I'd be willing to bet dollars to donuts that in one year's time, the total number of reviews for Outlook 2003 will far outnumber the combined number of reviews for KDE, Ximian, Mozilla and whatever other poorly named e-mail toys the open source crowd is playing with. Face it -- when it comes to market share, MS is the player on the block and to simply ignore it shows an intellectual laziness that calls into question his whole review...
I would have to say that explosives are the most abused technology in all of history.
I'd guess that if he asked Microsoft, they would've sent him a copy to review.
He could've also used Microsoft's Trial CD. $8 shipping is all it takes.
Lotus Notes is an application platform. The insurance agents would have have local copies ("replicas") of the application that includes business logic. The data is synched ("replicated") with the corporate servers whenever the PC is connected to the intranet. The application could easily mail notifications to the office workers who process the claims, but that does not require the mail client to be overloaded (or even using Notes for email.) Lotus Notes started as a secure application platform, then added email as another application with some special code to handle routing.
MS needed something that could claim to compete with Lotus Notes for the rich thin-client marketspace. Where Lotus Notes added email as another application on a secure platform, MS overloaded their email platform with an application platform. This small difference in philosophy has allowed MSOutlook to become the Virus Distribution System we all know and hate. The insurance agents use MSOutlook to create messages using Forms, and the client could synch with the corporate servers. The MSOutlook Forms are very limited when compared to what is possible with Lotus Notes. MS "synchronization" is like overwriting a file; Lotus Notes Replication is very like merging patches in CVS: only the changed fields are updated, so there is no conflict if 2 people change different fields on the same record.
MS's marketing machine has made the products seem to have similar capabilities, but the development effort is much greater and the applications have less functionality when using the MS platform.
- Every Lotus Notes application starts as a database with integrated security. Every MSOutlook application starts as secure as internet email.
- The business logic is updated every time Lotus Notes replicates. How do you update the MSOutlook clients?
- The Lotus Notes address book requires a password from every program before granting access. How many viruses and other programs read the MSOutlook address book?
- Lotus Notes asks for verification that you want to allow some code to read the file system. MSOutlook viruses email random files from your PC to your friends.
The philosophy behind these systems is so different that it is difficult to remember that they are trying to solve similar issues.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
For me, this is the killer feature for my email client.
I don't read my email on my Palm, but having to only write down email addresses in one place would be, to say the least, a Good Thing.
I guess I'm surprised this is not a more common feature people look for.
And no, I won't use Outlook. : )
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!