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This article first appeared in the January 2000 issue of the Louisville Computer News. It was written by Lee Larson.

The big and flashy part of the Internet revolution is the World Wide Web. But, the workaday world is still e-mail, where it all started. Consider that in the U.S. alone more than eight billion e-mail messages are sent daily. This is more mail than the Post Office delivers in two weeks. Many of us rarely send real folded and stanped mail any more because e-mail is so much easier and faster.

This could lead one to suspect that the Justice Department couldn't see the forest for the trees when it went after Microsoft. One part of the DoJ's argument was that Microsoft couldn't legally try to dominate the World Wide Web, and "remove the air" from Netscape, by giving away its browser, Internet Explorer. But, what about Microsoft's free e-mailer, Outlook Express? It gives almost insurmountable competition to every other e-mail client, and the combination of Internet Explorer and Outlook Express provides an excellent replacement for Communicator, Netscape's all-in-one Web tool.

This became clear a few months back when I decided my workhorse e-mail program, Claris Emailer, should be replaced. Between mailing lists and personal e-mail, my various accounts often get several hundred e-mail messages per day. Of course, I really don't want to read that much e-mail, and actually only look at about one message in every dozen or so. To pick the wheat from the chaff, my e-mail program must have powerful filtering and an efficient interface. Emailer has both.

But, Emailer lags behind the competition, and will likely never be upgraded. For example, it doesn't support styled e-mail, whether enriched or HTML, and knows nothing about IMAP. Emailer still works wonderfully under Mac OS 9, but it is frozen in time because the formerly independent subsidiary, Claris, was sucked back into Apple and few Claris products survived the trip. At about the same time, Apple cut a deal with Microsoft to bundle Outlook Express with every new Macintosh.

Because of this, Outlook Express has become the de facto standard e-mail client on the Mac, and it is an excellent program. In fact, in many ways it reminds one of Emailer. This is no coincidence, because Jud Spencer, one of the main programmers of Emailer, was lured away from Claris by Microsoft to be a project leader for Outlook Express.

Outlook Express is enticing because it's one of the few e-mail programs supporting virtually all the major standards. Its only competition, feature for feature, comes from Netscape Communicator and Eudora Pro.

For example, a new e-mail standard, introduced with Netscape Communicator, is HTML mail. Normal e-mail is just plain text, while HTML mail turns each e-mail message into a mini-Web page. The mail contains HTML formatting like any Web page, so styled text, fonts and fancy formatting can be shown. They can be shown, of course, only if your e-mail reader understands HTML, the markup language of the Web.

Writing a full-blown HTML interpreter is a formidable task. Few companies smaller than Netscape, Microsoft or QualComm, publishers of Eudora, have the resources to do it. For example, several competing programs, such as Mulberry and PowerMail have added a very limited HTML capability. Mailsmith, has none.

HTML mail is natural for Netscape Communicator because the powerful HTML interpreter built into Netscape Navigator is part of the same program. At the time it first appeared, no other e-mail program could display it properly. Microsoft quickly moved to fill this gap. By borrowing code from their browser, Internet Explorer, they quickly added HTML mail features to Outlook Express, maintaining parity with Netscape. Other mail readers had to scramble to keep up. So far, the only other program with a decent HTML mail display is Eudora Pro, and it took much effort and time to bring Eudora up to speed.

Another new e-mail feature is the Internet Mail Access Protocol (IMAP). Most people are familiar with Post Office Protocol (POP) mail, where your mail client talks to the mail server and downloads the mail to read from your own hard disk while deleting it from the server. IMAP differs from POP in that you have the choice of leaving your mail on the server, or downloading it. It effect, it makes no distinction between local and remote mailboxes. This is very handy for people, like me, who want to store their mail at a central site and read it from different locations.

Almost all e-mail clients support standard POP mail, but Communicator was among the first to add IMAP support. Outlook Express soon added it, but was extremely slow and unreliable until the recently released 5.0 version. Now it's rock-solid and fast. QualComm fought to add IMAP to Eudora Pro, and it's been an uphill battle. Until the most recent releases, it didn't work at all with some servers, and it still looks a little like it was grafted on as an afterthought, which it was!

The best IMAP client out there is Mulberry. It's the only one that started out as a pure IMAP mail reader, and this specialization shows. It's fast, reliable and easy to use. The biggest problem with it is that most people are used to POP, and some of the features in Mulberry require a paradigm shift. The newest Mulberry, still in beta testing, also supports POP mail.

PowerMail has an adequate IMAP component, while Mailsmith is purely POP.

So, there are only three full-featured e-mail clients on the Mac, and two of them, Microsoft's Outlook Express and AOL/Netscape's Communicator, are free. How does this affect the others?

Bare Bones Software, publishers of Mailsmith, basically admits they can't compete with the deep pockets of Microsoft and AOL/Netscape. They've cut back work on Mailsmith, and are putting their efforts into their main product, BBEdit.

Qualcomm, the publisher of Eudora Pro is taking a different and risky path.

Eudora started out as a project at the University of Illinois. When the programmers went commercial, the university cut a deal where some version of Eudora would always be free. That's how Eudora Light was born. Eudora Light has always been a pale shadow of its big sister, Eudora Pro, but it was always adequate.

Qualcomm has decided to start giving away Eudora Pro instead of Eudora LightÑwith a catch. They'll let anyone download a special version of Eudora Pro that picks up advertising off the Web. If you're willing to look at ads while you do your e-mail, you can leave it as is. If the ads annoy you, Qualcomm will sell you a key to register Eudora and get rid of the ads.

The problem now becomes, which client to use. My solution was a bit bizarre, but it's been working well for several months.

I have several e-mail addresses for different purposes. I never subscribe to mailing lists at my main e-mail address because I want the important e-mail to be obvious. My junk mail address collects all the lists and advertising. At home, I use Outlook Express and POP to automatically clean out the junk mail account at 3:00 A.M. every day. A set of Outlook Express filtering rules sorts the mail into the correct mailboxes as it arrives. (Some of it goes straight into the trash!) When I get around to reading it, it's ready for me.

My main e-mail account is read using IMAP with Mulberry. This way, the mail stays on the server, and I have the same view of my mail and mailboxes whether I'm home, in the office, or out of twon and checking in over the Internet. Life is a lot simpler because I no longer have to cart important messages around on disk.

All of the best e-mail clients can be downloaded for a test drive. Here's where to find them.

Communicator (www.netscape.com)

Eudora Pro (www.eudora.com)

Mailsmith (www.barebones.com)

Mulberry (www.cyrusoft.com)

Outlook Express (www.microsoft.com/mactopia/)

PowerMail (www.ctmdev.com)

Louisville Computer Society

At the January 25 meeting of the LCS Greg Willmore, Apple's Advisory System Engineer from the Indianapolis office will review new product announcements and demonstrate Apple's Wireless Technology including the AirPort, iBook, and iMac.

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