Tuesday, May 04, 2004

Email clients?

How many people use Eudora to check thier email? I've found that where I work, most of the staff who dont know much about computers use Eudora, because most staff people seem to be used to it, and recommend it to each other. On the other hand, a little more savvy staffers use Microsoft Outlook 2003. Faculty who have been here at the university for a while have a different myraid of clients that they are used to. With them preferences are more varied. Some use ssh+pine. Others use Eudora, while others use Outlook/Entourage. Still others use the web interface that the University provides. Students who have laptops use thier own combinations of Outlook, Netscape Mail, pine and so on. I personally find Pine to be the best, with evolution/Outlook the next best. The problem with evolution and outlook is that there is no way to keep each copy in sync. When I am using those clients, I tend to use thier calendering and task scheduling features, but there is a problem with that. Both of them get out of sync and there is no easy way to fix that. Or at least one that I know of. So I just use pine to quickly check my mail, and leave task scheduling and calendering to my brilliant memory (sarcasm here!).

Why I ask this question is that recently I've been helping a lot of people work with various different clients, and I really cant see why one would choose a client over Outlook 2003. The interface is amazingly beautiful. It makes checking email a joy. And if you have the right combination of software, its easily protected. Also, if you dont have a good anti-virus software, you should be safe unless you click on some stupid attachment.

Mozilla and hypocrisy

Right, but what about the experiences that Mozilla chooses to default for users like switching to  Yahoo and making that the default upon ...