TSGL: Email program recommendations?

[H Davis]

I used Pocomail (version  2.??? for quite a while and loved it. It was 
ultra reliable, but its best feature was a complete scripting language 
that allowed you to do a lot of good stuff.

OK, if it's so good, why aren't you still using it?

Poco's makers kept charging for each major revision. The user base was 
relatively small so getting help was a problem. My requirements were not 
extraordinary, so I gave up and switched to Thunderbird, but I sure miss 
the ability to script my way past a problem.

What you switch to depends  somewhat on what you need the program to do. 
If you use it mainly as an e-mail client many of the alternatives will 
do. If you use it as a contact manager, and this function is important 
to you, I think there are fewer choices. Thunderbird would probably not 
make a good contact manager if your needs are complex.

I've also come to the conclusion that the anti spam features of most 
e-mail clients are not worth the effort. Instead, I use a gmail account 
as my primary e-mail address, forwarding everything to it. Everything 
ends up there and I access it from Thunderbird using the POP3 interface. 
This makes it appear just like I'm getting my mail from my ISP's e-mail 
server; no web interface.

The advantage is:
1)  I get no ads from google.

2)  Google does the spam removal and does it very well since it has the 
experience of many users from which to generate its rules.

3)  Google keeps all the mail that comes through it (and all the mail I 
send if I use gmail as my outgoing server also), so I have a complete 
and automatic backup relieving me of doing a local backup of my 
messages. I still have to do a local backup of my address book though.

4)  I don't have to keep all my e-mails on my local machine because of 
3). I just keep the most important stuff, not the stuff I'll probably 
never look at again but just can't bring myself to delete.

On the downside:
5)  I have to use the gmail web interface about once a month to check 
the gmail spam folder to see if there is anything good in there.

6)  Gmail has a superiority complex. It thinks it's smarter than I am, 
so if I want to send myself an e-mail for the record, or CC myself, I 
have a problem. When I use Tbird to request my mail, gmail sees the mail 
from me, to me and says to itself, since this is from him, he must have 
seen it already so I'm not going to send it to him again - and it 
doesn't. This also shows up when I send (or reply) to a TSGL message. 
The message is from me and to me, so I don't get my own message. Only 
when someone else replies to my message will I see my original message. 
The un-downloaded e-mail IS retained by gmail so I can see it if I go to 
the web interface but it's frustrating. There is a lot of discussion 
about this on the Google forums but no solutions. I do have a work 
around if anyone else is interested.

7)  Gmail doesn't use the usual folder storage scheme. It has a few, 
predefined folders but you can't define your own. Everything goes into 
one big folder and you have to search for what you want. (Google is a 
search company after all.) But, since I rarely use the web interface 
this hasn't been a problem.

Re Eudora; I think development on this has stopped and it is now an open 
source project of the Mozilla Foundation called Penelope. Others may 
have more info on this.

There's a list of e-mail clients at: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_e-mail_clients

HTH

H Davis


Sylvia Gould wrote:
> I vote for Eudora, too. Especially like the Junk Box that comes with 6.1 
> and higher.
> Sylvia
>
> At 06:17 AM 7/28/2007, you wrote:
>   
>> Ron Grant wrote:
>>
>> I am game to try something else.  What do you like in an email program?
>> Thanks, Ron<<
>>
>> Ron, I use Eudora by Qualcomm.  Have used it for years and recommend it 
>> highly.
>>     
>
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-- 
H Davis   hdavis1 at gmail.com