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Zugg
MASTER


Joined: 25 Sep 2000
Posts: 23379
Location: Colorado, USA

PostPosted: Mon Feb 21, 2005 7:24 pm   

Email clients revisited
 
The topic this week is: Email clients!

After my hard disk crash, it was time to reinstall some "other" email clients to see just what eMobius is up against. The 3 email clients that I downloaded and installed were: Eudora, Thunderbird, and PocoMail (actually their new Barca product).

First impressions: Wow, these web sites make all of these products sound like the best mail client in the world. I wonder how true they are? [Edited later: How can they get away telling such lies?!]

OK, let's start with Thunderbird:

Installer is pretty simplistic, but it gets the job done. It asked if I wanted to convert either Outlook or Outlook Express. No other clients were listed. Selected Outlook. It opened it's Importer window and sat there for quite a long time.

My first problem with ALL of these clients: They want to automatically import ALL of your previous email. I don't necessarily want this yet. I just want my account settings. I don't want to convert all of my email until I know that I'll be switching to this client. After all, I have over 50,000 emails in my folders. This takes a LONG TIME to import. I don't want to wait for this.

At least Thunderbird gave a progress message. Although it was stuck without responding for a while.

Once the program loaded, it looked decent. Probably the cleanest user interface of the bunch. When fetching messages from an IMAP folder on the server, it was really slow. First it did something called "Compacting folder", then it started transferring the headers. One at a time...very slow and tedious. I know IMAP is faster than this...Outlook is faster than this!

Turns out that Thunderbird did *not* import all of my email accounts. It grabbed the first account (the IMAP account), and imported the local folder structure of my personal mail, but all of the folders were empty! Bad bad bad. If you are going to say "Importing" then you sure better actually import something!!

Overall first impression 6/10.

OK, then I turned to Eudora. It has an "old fashioned" installer (Install Shield based it looks like). When I ran it the first time, I got another Import wizard kind of thing. Selected Outlook again. This time, I didn't even get a progress bar! Eudora just became unresponsive, started taking up 100% of the CPU and just beeped if I clicked on anything. Finally it said it was completed. It took about 15 minutes, during which time I got no user feedback!

For my IMAP server, for some reason each folder is listed twice. I have no idea why. When I double-clicked a folder, it displays the folder in this small little box. I had to maximize it to see the mail list and the mail preview window. Bad user interface. And I'm totally lost in the huge menu system. It's not at all obvious what any of this stuff does. Certainly isn't very friendly for people converting from Outlook.

Overall First Impression 4/10

OK, now to PocoMail/Barca. I was most interested in this because they have recently mail Barca more of an Outlook replacement by adding the Calendar and Contacts. With the scripting language, it sounds a lot like eMobius. So I was a bit excited.

They use the Nullsoft installer, but overwrite the Nullsoft information with their own. I dislike this. They should be giving Nullsoft credit for their great installer. But ok, whatever.

The first dialog screen I see asked if I want Pocomail as my default mail reader. Now, all of the previous products asked this too. But in PocoMail, the dialog box looks like something from the old Visual Basic days! Ugly window with misaligned buttons and the checkbox for not asking again right up against the bottom edge of the window. Very unprofressional.

Then it asks me if I want to import Outlook email. At least this time it makes it clear that it is going to import all of the actual mail. I unselect the import mail option this time (I'm tired of waiting for it to convert 50,000+ messages) and just tell it to import the other settings.

It askes me for my account info. Apparently it didn't actually import any account settings from Outlook. Oh well. So I enter my IMAP server and account info and let it continue.

Where are my IMAP folders? I can't find them anywhere. In fact, the screen is incredibly cluttered. And with the default window size, the options on the toolbar extend past the right edge of the window!

Sure, there might be power here, but it isn't organized at all. Lots and lots of clutter. And the biggest problem is that I can't even figure out how to look at my folders on the IMAP server. The Inbox is empty.

First Impressions: 2/10

OK, I'll admit that this was the "FIRST IMPRESSIONS" of all 3 email clients, from someone that is pretty familiar with email clients. I'm sure that after learning more about each program it will probably improve.

But overall, I was pretty disappointed in the quality of what I found. And most interesting was that the free program (Thunderbird) came across the best, which isn't at all what I expected. I used Eudora about 10 years ago in Los Alamos, and it looks about the same, with some newer icons. Definitely not what I expected from a well-established company like that. And PocoMail had some great stuff on their web site, but it wasn't reflected in the design of the actual program.

So, I still feel that there is a big need for eMobius. It is obviously going to be hard to get it noticed in such a crowded feel. Will I need to lie on my website too in order to sell it? I hope not.

And, of course, first impressions are in the eye of the beholder. But it's at least obvious to me that none of these programs spent very much time actually testing their import features in "real world" situations. A *real* import wizard would let me choose what folders I wanted to import and would give me a *lot* more feedback on what it was doing.

In fact, with the MAPI support in Outlook, I plan to have the existing Outlook mail completely accessible as just another folder in the main user interface. Only when Outlook has been uninstalled is it really necessary to actually import all of the messages from the PST file.

Well, now that I'm well-motivated again, it's back to programming for me. I have a *lot* of work to do, and a lot of expectations (mostly my own) to live up to.

If you have your own first impressions of email products, feel free to post. I'm interested in starting a discussion of what makes a good first impression, and what doesn't.
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Zugg
MASTER


Joined: 25 Sep 2000
Posts: 23379
Location: Colorado, USA

PostPosted: Mon Feb 21, 2005 7:38 pm   
 
OK, Eudora has earned my wrath! Even though I clicked the "No" button when asked if I wanted to make Euroda my default mail client, it still messed stuff up. I had to change it back with Outlook. Eudora forced itself onto my quicklaunch bar also without asking. Bad!

Of course, Barca put an icon for itself on my desktop, even though I specifically told it not to. Again...bad.
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Kiasyn
Apprentice


Joined: 05 Dec 2004
Posts: 196
Location: New Zealand

PostPosted: Tue Feb 22, 2005 6:34 am   
 
Disobedient programs should be banned :D
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Kiasyn
Owner of Legends of Drazon
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Check out Talon, an easy IMC connection.
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Castaway
GURU


Joined: 10 Oct 2000
Posts: 793
Location: Swindon, England

PostPosted: Mon Feb 28, 2005 11:33 am   
 
Zugg, I sense a small bit of anti open-source-softwareness here.. Why did you expect Thunderbird to be the worst of the lot? Think of the advantages, the thing is actually programmed by people who USE it regularly, people add/improve pieces they use themselves, they are motivated to improve a programm that will make their own use of it better. That's not to say there aren't downsides to open source software, a lot of it has problems getting off the ground, getting enough user/developer interest to get anywhere. Thunderbird doesn't have that problem, because of it's association with Netscape/Mozilla and so on.

In fact I'd go so far as to compare this sort of OS software with small software companies like Zuggsoft. Being a one-man band your best bet to get/keep users is to keep up with their needs/priorities/bug reports on your software, and cater to them. Larger companies don't have to care quite so much (obviously no caring at all isn't good for them either).

Anyfish, as to email clients in general, I've been using Operas built-in "M2" client for my GUI client for a while now, and it does enough of what I need to make me not bother to go look for better ones ,) It appears to be able to import from Outlook, Eudora, Thunderbird, Netscape, generic mbox and older Opera versions, I havent tried any of these though. I wouldn't expect it to be able to import settings from other mail clients.. While I realise that users would find such a thing handy, I would assume that it would require a lot of handwork on the part of the client programmer, since it doesn't seem likely that other clients would publish how they save their settings.. (Which means every time a client changes how they do this, other clients would have to figure it out all over again). Although it's not a standalone client, you may want to look at it just for more impressions/ideas.

Hmm, why do none of these seem to be able to import from Lotus Notes? Odd.. (Although, I'm not sure if Notes is used much by 'normal' people, probably mostly in companies.. )

It does sound like something with a simplistic default interface is needed (with the ability to expand to an 'advanced' interface, maybe choosable on install, plus toolbars customizable)

How about a poll/survey on a forum here, asking what clients people are using, to get a feel for it? (Maybe a site header on each persons next login, pointing to the survey.. which should allow users to choose a client from a list, or enter their own if not listed)

Lady C.
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Zugg
MASTER


Joined: 25 Sep 2000
Posts: 23379
Location: Colorado, USA

PostPosted: Tue Mar 01, 2005 7:59 am   
 
No, I wasn't being anti-open-source...I was being really surprised by the lack of "first impression" response from companies that charge money for their email clients. Companies like Qualcomm Eudora have been around for ages, and I just couldn't believe that they are charging money for such sub-standard software. These were all email clients that had gotten 5 star ratings on various sites, and I just can't figure out why. Have the standards of reviewers and even users dropped so much?

I actually expected Thunderbird to do well. It's the closest thing to eMobius that exists, so it wasn't a surprise. Yes, I think that there is a market amoung small businesses for a client like Thunderbird that is supported by a real company rather than open source, but I don't need to get into the open source argument here. It's fine for some, but not for others.

I used Lotus Notes for a number of years. It could be very difficult to import from. For one thing, the database is usually on a remote Notes server and you'd have to write the server access protocol and security protocols to even access it. And even if you got that far, it's a complex proprietary database format that is much harder to import from than something like mbox or even Outlook. The only way to really do it is via some sort of API, and I don't know if there are any free Notes API around. Notes tends to be very expensive, so I'd be surprised to find anything cheap that let you access Notes data.

Also, I'm not going after Notes customers at all. Companies that use Notes are generally pretty happy, and they are the really large companies that I'm not targetting with eMobius. I just can't provide the level of support that such big companies need. And if someone has already paid the big bucks for an expensive Notes infrastructure, they aren't going to change (same thing applies to big companies using MS Exchange). I'm going after Outlook users, not users of huge workgroup systems.

We did some informal surveys over in the eMobius forum last year. I think I have a fair view of what lots of people are using, which is why I choose the clients listed above for initial testing. Other clients that I'll probably test include Courier and TheBat, and probably M2.
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