[ale] -Email client, was: Re: oops - mea culpa - Re: mass email for school and school web site

[Robert Reese]

Hi Paul,

Good to hear from you! :)

Monday, July 13, 2009, 5:31:52 AM, you wrote:

> On Mon July 13 2009, Robert Reese wrote:
>> I *really* gotta pay attention to the sorting in this yet another new  (but
>> this time permanent) email client!!!  AND now I remember why I always used
>> to QUEUE the messages rather than send them immediately.

> I tried looking at the full headers, but I don't recgnize a line with your
> email client.. what is this "new" email client and why the change?


Let me start out by saying the email program in question is a W.32 program.  ;c)

The name of the software is The Bat! by RIT Labs (somewhere in "Dracula" territory, if my geography is right.)

I switched away from the DISASTER that is Barca Pro by Poco Systems; it is essentially PocoMail on steroids with shareable calendaring.  As it turned out, the shareable calendaring was the only good thing about that $80 lump of bad code.  I stayed with it for an entire year, hoping it would get fixed.  But Poco's development cycle is about as fast as a 486DX2 w/16MB RAM trying to run Windows XP and downloading the latest Flash advertisement via dial-up.  They vehemenently deny it, of course.

If you want specifics of why I ultimately chose and settled on The Bat!, feel free to ask; my set of requirements is pretty unique and specialized and The Bat! meets most of them. Just FYI, I purchased the "Pro" version for both the built-in PGP 2.6 as well as integrated support for OpenPGP/GPG along with the "sync" feature that I've truly needed!  It cost me $78 for two Pro licenses; one for the desktop and one for the laptop. (They don't tell you that you get a discount off the price if you purchase more than one.  I guess they like you to be pleasantly surprised.)


But how I got here is another question...

History: 

Before going to Barca, I was using the paid version of Courier, the never-finished upgrade of Calypso, from Rose City Software.  RCS, who was paying the original developer of Calypso, strung us customers along for more than a year of promises of a fixed version of Courier with the latest features such as threading  and IMAP/MAPI.  We customers later learned the original developer's apparent "night job" was DJ'ing for the Mary Magdalene Band and the Bad Habit Sisters somewhere in Houston TX, and had abandoned the development to spin Stryker disks.  Hesitatingly, eventually, and agonizingly slowly, Rose City Software FINALLY admitted what had happened and then eventually announced it wasn't going to develop the software anymore.  That was a year ago.  Interestingly, shortly after that announcement they announced they were picking up another developer to start up again.  But I'd already given up and moved to Barca.

By then I had been with Calypso, and then Courier, for nearly a decade.  Calypso was absolutely the best email software I'd ever used, and the first few stable versions of Courier came a close second.  Calypso just was unable to use new features such as SSL and IMAP.  It did not have flagging or color coding, nor threading.  But it WAS stable and bulletproof from worms, viruses, and the like.  Best of all, it was a stand-alone program with the only changes it made to the Windows registry was to set it as the default email client meaning that I could put it on a USB thumb drive and stick it into any Windows computer, even a fresh install, and as long as it had internet access and a lousy firewall I could do my email.  In the years I used it, I lost somewhere between two and five emails TOTAL due to crashes (due mostly to Windows and faulty memory).  [insert wisecracks here]  Courier was far more buggy, however.

I did look for replacements, first looking to Linux since Calypso/Courier was a primary reason out of just a handful of softwares I never completely switched to Linux and dumping Courier gave me an opportunity to switch to Linux.  A year ago, just as I did a couple of months ago, tried the clients listed here:
http://email.about.com/od/linuxemailclients/tp/Linux-UNIX-Email-Clients-fo---.htm without success, although Balsa and Sylpheed have potential.  I have tried, time and again, to like Evolution.  I just have never been able to get there.  None of them have the set of features that I need and want (and Thunderbird doesn't even come close).  I thought erroneously that Barca provided those features.

Incidentally, I sure as heck wasn't going to go back to the long-dead Eudora (paid for as well, but the upgrade pricing was insulting).  Before Eudora I learned hard lessons about Outlook with my free Outlook 98; with all due fairness, however, O98 was a terrific piece of software in its time and really was the best email program out there.  In its time.  Incidentally, I attribute the success of, and continued resistance of its users to switch away from, MS Office to both the Word GUI and to Outlook.

And to make the whole mess utterly ironic, Rose City Software just three months ago quit Courier's development yet again and officially declared an official "successor" to Courier...  Yes, folks, they are selling *PocoMail*.  I just about fell off my rocker and died.  I found out because I returned to the RCS Courier forum to look for alternatives to PocoMail/Barca!

The good news is I've purchased (or literally in the middle of purchasing) CrossOver 8.  A good deal of the software I prefer works well enough in it, and for those that don't the latest version of VirtualBox is working exceedingly well.  Tests of The Bat! worked mostly well enough in the last 7.x version so I have high hopes for the new version.

I'll let you know how well CrossOver 8 works with The Bat!  For now, I'm *obvously* still adjusting settings, preferences, and so forth.

Cheers,
Robert~