COMPUTING FOR THE BEWILDERED By Bill Hayles Hello, again. THE INTERNET - Part 5 E-MAIL AND NEWS. THE ALTERNATIVES TO OUTLOOK EXPRESS ====================================================== Last time I said: There is a lot wrong with OE; very few experienced mail and news enthusiasts employ it. I also said: Next time, I'll be looking at the alternatives to Outlook Express, including a free add-on that gets round most of Outlook Express's technical shortcomings. Firstly, you may well ask what's wrong with Outlook Express. Even more than usual, I am expressing my personal opinion. Although there are many who agree with me, I know others think that since Microsoft hold a dominant position, standards should be changed to reflect the way Microsoft do things, rather than the other way round. I think they are wrong, and I'd like to explain why. Some of my objections are extremely technical, and beyond the remit of this column, but others are very simple. E-Mail and News, the latter in the form of Fidonet and the still thriving Usenet, pre-date Microsoft's interest in the Internet by many years. Microsoft were late converts to the Internet, only taking it on board after their attempt at an alternative failed. Over the years, many standards for the composition, sending and receiving of e-mail and news have been accepted. These are called RFCs, and amongst other aims are designed to ensure that the Internet remains platform independent, and that an e-mail sent (just as an example) from a PC running Linux can be received and read on an Archimedes. If these standards aren't adhered to, then unless you know the hardware your recipient is using is compatible with your format, you can't be certain that your words will be received in the same. All other e-mail and news clients respect these standards and aim to comply with them. Only Outlook Express thinks they can be ignored. OK, so you want to carry on using Outlook Express, but you want to correct most of its problems. What can you do? Help is at hand in the form of OEQuoteFix, a free utility which you can download from http://home.in.tum.de/~jain/software/oe-quotefix/ What does OEQuoteFix do? To quote the author: OE-QuoteFix will extend the functionality of MS Outlook Express in numerous ways! Its main purpose is to modify message composition windows on-the-fly to allow for correct quoting and to change the appearance of your plain-text replies and forwards in general: move your signature, use compressed indentation, have RFC compliant signatures, etc. But the second feature is equally practical: OE-QuoteFix can instantly color quoted passages (according to the level of indentation), fix bad quoting and generally beautify messages as you view them in Outlook Express. You will have noticed that OE doesn't exactly feature the most intelligent quoting algorithm; in fact, it's the silliest one imaginable. Most e-mail exchanges refer to previously sent material, basically in the form of question and answer. Outlook Express assumes you want the answer before the question, something like the TV programme "Jeopardy". This is why posting the answer before the original, usually called "top posting" is sometimes called posting Jeopardy style. In addition, OE commits the following errors: Horribly broken quotes - line breaks in the wrong wrong places Signatures are not stripped automatically on reply. They have to be deleted manually! Signatures are not RFC compliant - no space after the dashes! Empty lines at the end of the message are quoted. The attribution lines are too long and cannot be modified for a 'personal touch'. Email headers are even worse! Line breaks missing between the signature and the quoted message. OEQuoteFix fixes this behaviour to make Outlook Express behave like any other e-mail client. It also attempts to clean up already badly formatted quotes (from an Outlook Express NOT equipped with OEQuoteFix) so that they will look more readable. It also enables you to show quotes in different colours, and to make full use of certain plain text conventions. But however good OEQuoteFix is, it can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, and there are many alternative e-mail and news clients available. Each have their supporters, who will argue loud and hard that their favourite is better then the others, but the one thing that we agree on is that they are all better than Outlook Express. For news (i.e. Usenet), there is one product that dominates - called Free Agent in its free form or just Agent in the more powerful paid-for version. How it works is that you download an evaluation copy from http://forteinc.com/agent/download.php This will work as the full product for 30 days. After that, certain features will become disabled unless you have bought a key (licence) for $29. In its full version, Agent also acts as an e-mail client, but with comparatively limited functionality (only one e-mail account per instance, for example). If you wish to make use of Usenet, Agent is your product, but for e-mail , there are better alternatives. I use Agent for Usenet, but not for e-mail. Mention must be made here of Turnpike, one of the few programs competent at both e-mail and news. This is supplied free of charge to all clients of the UK Internet Service Provider Demon, but is also available to anybody else at a cost of GBP17,62. You can download it from http://www.demon.net/products/turnpike/ The most popular e-mail client is Eudora, available from http://www eudora.com This features multiple e-mail accounts, handles both plain text and HTML e-mail, and has very powerful archiving and list handling abilities. It has three forms - paid for ($29,95), lite (free) and sponsored (full, but containing adverts). Pegasus Mail is a free e-mail client, available from http://www.pmail.com Another powerful, richly featured mailer, this is not as popular as Eudora but still has many advocates. The Bat! is a recent newcomer to the world of e-mail, but contains built-in virus and worm checking. Only available in a commercial version, and at a price of $35, you can download a trial from http://www.ritlabs.com/the_bat/ I have left my own preferred client until last. I use a Japanese product, the work of one man, named Becky! You can download an evaluation copy from http://www.rimarts.co.jp The price of a licence for Becky! is $40, more than for any other client, so why do people pay it. Simple - Becky! is the best (in my opinion, of course). It allows not only multiple mailboxes, but multiple "personalities" for each mailbox, multiple socket configurations, mailing list management and, for those who want it (I don't) full HTML capability. It has a "plug-in" facility which means that third party writers can, and have, written add-on programs to improve the program even further. If you ever get an e-mail from me, it will have been written using Becky!. All of the programs I have mentioned (with the possible exception of Turnpike) can be downloaded and trialled free of charge. So, what do you have to lose? Give them a try. If you decide you prefer Eudora to Becky!, I won't mind or even be surprised. However, I doubt that whichever you choose you'll ever want to use Outlook Express again! That's all for today. Next time, I'll be looking at discussions groups, both of the Usenet and Mailing List varieties.