E-Mail Client Considerations

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Mail Clients

Introduction

The BAT!

Thunderbird

Gmail (and web based mail)

Further reading and useful links

Introduction

With e-mail engrained into our lives (OK, mine at least), I have embarked upon what seemed to be an endless quest to find a decent e-mail client. My daily mail can reach several hundred messages from work, personal, and as a subscriber to several list-mail services.

Managing it should not be such a monumental task. All I needed was a good client to help me. A certain main stream office suite mail client just seems too bloated and is lacking in many ways unless connected to a corporate mail environment.

The BAT!

After downloading nearly two dozen open source, shareware, and commercial trials, I have registered The Bat! Some features that hooked me are:

Inline spell checking in all modes, even plain text.
Multi-threaded/handles transfers to and from many accounts at the same time. AND, while doing so, typing a new message is smooth with no erratic text input because of background message transfers.
Ability to turn off html mail! If it is a legitimate message that you must view in html, there is a tab to view it as such. Not only does html mail often LOOK bad, it IS bad. In my experiences, if someone cannot write it well in plain text, it will only be worse when 'spiffed up' in crazy fonts, colors, stationary, etc. More on plain text mail and other e-mail netiquette here.
The ability to manage mail at the server. In other words, delete that spam from your server before you even download it!
Each mail account can have its own templates for new messages, replies, forwards, etc. Even folders within accounts can have their own templates.
Each account has its own rules. No more added conditions to rules in order to stop processing a message into other folders for different accounts! As with the previous bullet point, even folders within accounts can have their own rule sets. Example, folder A allows mail to stay on the server for 2 days while folder B deletes it from the server immediately.
Very simple to use in-line replies. Breaking up a reply into sections makes the reply easier to follow when it is complex or involves many parts.
No need for third party utilities for such things as blocking attachments with certain file extensions, stripping read receipts, etc. Even random signatures can be included (those little quips a lot of us like) without external programs to generate them. Even though these programs are cheap or free (Watch Your Back, Siggy, etc.) why waste resources and slow the startup process?
Smaller memory footprint and the code just seems tighter. Task Manager commonly reports less than 5MB of memory usage.
Works fine with my anti-virus program. I've tested with Norton, McAfee, and AVG. Additionally, it is less prone to being exploited because it does not use the MS address book and is not the large target that MS products are.
Promises to include newsreader capabilities in a future release
Doesn't forget passwords when checking numerous accounts
Decent searching capabilities. With a click or two, a search can include all or specific accounts and folders, time parameters, etc.
Can import from most popular mail programs. I admit, I have not tried to import my previous client's rules. The Bat! rule sets just seemed so easy and clean that I did not want to muck up the waters, I just started fresh.
Right clicking a folder allows selection of things like marking all messages in the folder as read, killing duplicates, re-applying your filters, etc.

Of course, I am only writing of the advantages for certain conditions. In a corporate environment, Outlook will continue to prevail because of its tight integration to Exchange Servers and the other products in the Office Suite.

Thunderbird

Now that everyone knows I am a BAT fan, let's explore other clients. One that is very promising and is Open Source (free) is Thunderbird, from the makers of the popular Firefox browser. Features include adaptive junk mail controls, RSS and Newsgroup reading, message grouping, privacy protections, decent filtering, and read receipt management. If Thunderbird continues its course I may consider switching from the BAT if the BAT's next major upgrade is not worth the cost.

Gmail

Gmail, and other popular web based mail accounts such as Hotmail and Yahoo mail, are handy to have for several reasons, primarily because they are accessible from any web connected computer or kiosk and are not lost when changing Internet service providers. I recommend everyone have one, it's not like they cost anything!

If you haven't already heard about Gmail, it's a new search-based web-mail service from Google. It has been in Beta testing since the summer of 2004 (I'm guessing about that based on when I got my account). It currently offers:

a minimum of 1,000 megabytes (one gigabyte) of free storage, most accounts are well over 2 gigabytes
Built-in Google search that instantly finds any message you want
Automatic arrangement of messages and related replies into "conversations"
Text ads and related pages that are relevant to the content of your messages
web based so it is available from any Internet connected browser