Subj : Email Clients... To : Will Honea From : Peter Knapper Date : Tue Jul 26 2005 05:13 pm Hi Will, (and thanks to Gord and Dave for your input as well)... WH> Peter, I've been using the Polarbar mailer for 3-4 years and it's been WH> about the best I've found. I'm using the 1.25 version. The version I have been looking at is 1.25a build 1965, and there is nothing in the ZIP file newer than 23-03-03, so its probably fairly similar to what you have. Your comments are indeed a comfort as to its abilities. I guess my main question is this - Would you feel comfortable that it will handle ALL incoming mail but do NOTHING that could put my machine at risk? The last thing I want is S/W that tries to do "automatic decoding" or something daft that it shouldn't (a la Bill Gates Dummies Guide to crashing your machine)... WH> You can set up WH> multiple accounts, have one account query multiple email servers WH> manually or on a schedule, and effectively use filters for mail WH> sorting. Here is where my preferences stand out and really define what I would call a "useful product". My "ideal" Mail Client should be able to pick up mail from multiple POP3/IMAP accounts, and put ALL received messages into just ONE INBOX. Then I use "scripts" to identify specific Email and store them appropriately, the rest I can distribute into a single message storage "tree". I would then like to be able to reply to messages such that the arrival address of the input message is used to determine the origin address of the reply (if this makes sense). WH> The Bayesian filter is pretty darned good at catching SPAM WH> once you get enough entries for it to identify it (remember that it WH> needs about as many "good" messages tagged as "bad" ones to be WH> effective). Good, thats something I was hoping would be useful... WH> Spell checker is OK, but needs a bit of educating for your WH> specific vocabulary. I noted that in my limited testing, but I dont mind training it how to talk Kiwi..........;-) WH> It has provisions for both text and html viewing WH> and does a pretty good job of extracting text from html when in the WH> text mode. I prefer to have all my outbound (and inbound) email defaulting to plain text, and then have selected address book entries specifying something else if I want. WH> It's slow to load, but I've had good luck with it running 24/7 for WH> months on end once loaded and after inital setup time it's adequately WH> nimble. I tend to leave frequent use applications running these days (Mozilla stays up for weeks at a time), RAM is cheap and who wants to wait around........;-) WH> I use it at home and at our church (35 "accounts". I settled WH> on it as the best available and haven't seen any that make me want to WH> change. Is that 35 different Email addresses with 35 different users accessing just THEIR Email, or just one user managing 35 Email accounts? WH> It had (and may still have) a pretty active development group but WH> somehow I lost contact with the mail list several months back and WH> haven't found it again so I'm not sure what the status is right now. There is a reference to a ail list on the Website but I noted that it seemed pretty quiet. Its hard to tell if thats because there are no bugs or the group has just "gone quiet" over time... WH> There was supposed to be a new release about the time I lost them but WH> the old version is adequate for now so I've procrastinated chasing it WH> down. The "1.25a" release has quite a change log and could be worth checking out - http://www.polarbar.org/changelog.html Thanks for your thoughts. Cheers............pk. --- Maximus/2 3.01 * Origin: Another Good Point About OS/2 (3:772/1.10) .