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Corporate Email Clients Reviewed
An anonymous reader writes "Some companies seem to take the easy way out by depending solely on Microsoft for their email needs. To all IT managers who want to breathe easier, however, there are about eight alternatives in the market today, including Barca, Calypso, Eudora, Lotus Notes, Pegasus, Pine, The Bat and Mozilla Thunderbird--all featured in this review."
I tried to use Thunderbird (getting ready for the Linux switch) -- but found its address book/contact handling slightly miserable.
Do we have an easy to implement alternative if we're looking to manage/sort/categorize a few hundred (to a few thousand) contacts? It doesn't need to have multi-user support/nor do I really want it.
Actually, it is. I know, you think it's insane. To each his own.
Until recently, I worked in a medical billing office. Their legacy app was written in Clipper in the 80's. As of last year, they were still using it. I don't know about now. The office was still an old Novell server and DOS 6.22 clients.
Many corporate environments believe you don't fix something that isn't broken. This system worked for them. When I first started working there (several years ago) I was tasked with giving these people (still running 486 PCs in the year 2004) access to e-mail from the same DOS systems they accessed their medical billing applications.
Now, guess which product worked under DOS 6.22 with packet drivers for TCP/IP and supported IMAP to access our corporate e-mail system. If you guessed PC-PINE, you guessed correctly.
It relies on the proprietary database that has been around since the BBS days! Furthermore, you have to pay extra to support Internet gateways (even POP3). The licensing model runs exactly like most pre-Internet BBS/mail server software, which you definitely want to avoid. But the worst part is that you MUST use the settings file (which resembles 'skins' for media players) to connect EVERY FirstClass site! There are cheaper and more interoperatable alternatives even back in 1980s, and it is totally useless for setting up any new site in the post-Internet world we live in. If you want to run a bulletin board, you're better off using phpBB, which is open sourced, supports open protocols and requires ZERO client software.