Mail Clients
February 8, 1999
Both browsers incorporate their own email clients (Microsoft
Outlook Express and Netscape Messenger), and both have finally
evolved into good packages. Traditionally, power emailers prefer
to use
Eudora,
but frankly both Outlook Express and Messenger have
left Eudora in the dust, at least for the moment. The sad fact is
that my perfect email client hasn't been built yet. Each of the 3
major possibilities has its own strengths and its own aggravating
weaknesses.
The big pain in the butt about email clients has always been file
compatibility. Until recently, you couldn't import or export messages
from one package to another, so once you chose one, you were stuck for
life. Both Messenger and Outlook Express can now import messages and
address books from either of the other two big boys. Guess what? Eudora
can't.
The root of all the nightmares with email clients is the fact that
they don't treat email messages as ordinary Windows files. They're
stored in there somewhere, but you're not entitled to know where,
or to manage them in any way other than those allowed within the
program. Thank goodness, Outlook Express and Messenger both now at
least let you specify what folder your messages are stored in.
Once again, Eudora is comparatively primitive - it insists that
you keep your messages in the Eudora program directory, making
backing them up a big pain.
So why would anyone need Eudora? Hmm... For years the conventional
wisdom was that every well-dressed geek needed Eudora, but then
for years both Outlook Express and Messenger were hopelessly lame.
The newest versions of both match Eudora in terms of mail-handling
capabilities like filtering, signatures and stationery, and far
surpass it in terms of flexibility. Actually, if you were thinking
of migrating to Eudora, you can't anyway, unless you're willing to
discard all your messages from Outlook or Messenger.
Lots of new security features, including support for digital IDs,
have been incorporated into the new email clients, and as mentioned
above, advanced features like filtering and stationery are much
improved. All 3 major email clients now handle HTML email quite well,
so plain-text email may be on the way out. However, I'm not so sure
that clogging the already over-taxed Net with formatting that most
messages don't need is such a great idea. One of my pet peeves is
that exchanging data between email clients and other programs is a
hassle. Text copied from or pasted into email clients tends to
mysteriously lose or acquire line breaks, among other glitches.
Widespread use of HTML email is likely to complicate matters.
To sum up, both Communicator 4.5 and Explorer 5.0 represent
incremental improvements, not major overhauls. Very soon however,
the existing balance of power in the browser wars is about to be
radically altered. A little reptile called Gecko is about to change
the whole equation. We may even witness the end of the browser war
as such. A war-weary Web will doubtless find this the best news of
the century.
There's a new Lizard in town.
The Latest from the Browser Trenches
Additional Resources
|
