Computers Suck

Jim Roepcke reminded me today that Computers Suck, and Operating Systems suck, and that they're both much easier to work with if you remember that (this was part of a broader conversation, trust me).

However, in my opinion:

Nothing sucks on a computer as much as email clients.

They suck infinitely.

I've never seen or used an email client with more than "great potential". They always disappoint, and those with the most potential (like MailSmith, from BareBones) end up discontinued (sometimes unofficially) before the potential is realized. Why? Probably because the lowest-common-denominator free app, Outlook Express, has killed the market.

(Update: thankfully, I was wrong about MailSmith, it wasn't discontinued. BareBones just went a long time without updating it.)

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RE: Computers Suck

The thing that has always ended up killing any good things I find in an e-mail app is the data handling, however. I get _tons_ of e-mail. All things being equal, I would keep all of it...but none of the e-mails tools I've used can handle it. They all start to barf dealing with thousands of messages.

I have at least 70 mailboxes and some of them are around 40 MB (that makes tens of thousands of messages). Eudora handles that happily with only 5 MB of ram (no, I don't work for Qualcomm). :-)

Flip

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RE: Computers Suck

On Thursday, August 10, 2000 at 9:08 PM, Greg Pierce (greg@turtleprod.com) wrote:

>I've got to admit, however, that I was getting to like Outlook Express 5.0 /
>Mac pretty well. It has a very usable interface, good management of
>multiple accounts, good spell checking on the fly (if you have Office
>installed)...and didn't overwhelm me with a million open windows ( my main
>beef w/ Eudora/Mac that made me switch ).

I dislike the filtering in OE5/Mac. I absolutely love the filtering in MailSmith, but it's a little bit buggy and slow... which is where they left it. :-(

I also hated Claris Emailer less than any other email client on the mac, when it was still a "live" email client.

It's made a cynic out of me, in this regard. As long as I'm going to hate my email client, and I've been burned by paying for two eventually-killed email clients that I hated less than the others, I should just stick with the free one.

Unfortunately, I don't hate the free one less than the others. :-(

>The thing that has always ended up killing any good things I find in an
>e-mail app is the data handling, however. I get _tons_ of e-mail. All
>things being equal, I would keep all of it...but none of the e-mails tools
>I've used can handle it. They all start to barf dealing with thousands of
>messages. That's what I don't really get...why would you build a tool like
>an e-mail app w/o a good embedding db engine!

Yes, I've had this discussion with Brian Andresen and Jim Roepcke before. It's definitely the thing I don't understand about mail clients... there are a lot of people out there getting as much mail as I do... why doesn't someone make a mail client to handle our excessive email volume?

MailSmith starts to choke at about 17,000 - 18,000 messages, which is really just a few months worth of messages from all of the lists I'm on.

Seth

Seth Dillingham seth@macrobyte.net
President, Macrobyte Resources (860) 572-0244
========================================================================
76 Dogwood Lane http://www.MacrobyteResources.com/
Mystic, CT 06355

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RE: Computers Suck

Nothing sucks on a computer as much as email clients.

Not sure what you ask to your email client, Seth, but I'm very pleased with Eudora. :-)

It works fine with multiple personalities, has great filter features (I've got at least 90% of spam filtered out), it's fast, it checks your spelling as you type, and you can even use it for free (if you accept to see a little window displaying ads, à la AIM).

I'm using the 5.0 beta 10, at the moment, but the 4.2.3 has 90% of its features.

Flip

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RE: Email Clients: MailSmith and Mail.app

Me too. I hate how bad email is now that there's no money in it.

And unfortunately, Mail.app gets really flaky when you have over 50 mailing lists blasting it with over 500 messages a day.

At least, it does for me. I have to force quit it a few times a day. It doesn't look like it loses any data, but, I could be wrong.

Until I can get a really really good email client for OS X I'll stick with Mail.app because it's a Cocoa app, and that means lots of nice things just work -- like Services, the scroll wheel on my mouse, real-time spell checking, scroll-bar "scroll to here", etc etc.

Jim

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