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Hack 66 Fire Outlook and Outlook Express

Contrary to popular belief, Microsoft
doesn't make the only two email programs on the
planet. Eudora and Pegasus are great, free alternatives.

Strange, but true:
before Outlook and Outlook Express, there was email software. I know
it, because I used it all the time. That email software is still
around, and some believe it is superior to Outlook and Outlook
Express in some ways. While there are many alternative email programs
out there, my two favorites, Eudora and Pegasus, have both been
around a very long time. While both have some drawbacks, they each
have enough unique features that they may make you want to throw away
Outlook and Outlook Express.

6.5.1 Check Your Mood with Eudora

Once
upon a time, Eudora ruled the roost. In the pre-Outlook and
pre-Outlook Express days, you'd find it on the
desktops of power users everywhere. Although it's
not nearly as popular today, it has its fans, and with good reason,
because it has some unique features you won't find
in any other email software.

Foremost is one of the all-time great features in an email program, a
feature that will be welcomed gladly by anyone who has ever blasted
out a red-hot email in a fit of anger. As you type,
MoodWatch analyzes your messages for
their degree of aggressiveness and rates them on a scale of ice cube
all the way up to three chili peppers. You see the rating as you
write and you get a warning before sending the message if it might be
offensive.

Another goody is the ability to share files on a
peer-to-peer basis with
other Eudora users, through the
Eudora Sharing Protocol (ESP). You
define groups of people with whom you want to share files, and
they're the only ones who can access those files. In
turn, you can can share files with people who give you access to
files on their computers. The New ESP Share Group Wizard walks
you through setting up a share group. Choose Tools ESP
Groups New... "Create a brand
new share group" Next. You can customize
many features of this tool, including the ability to set up a new
mailbox just for users in this group, so that the messages from users
in your new group will be filtered automatically into the appropriate
mailbox. The wizard prompts you for this and other options, including
share group name, share group description, transfer to new or
existing mailbox, share group folder (choose where the files to be
shared with the group will live), and even the choice of which Eudora
personalityDominant or otherwiseshould be associated
with the file share group. You can also set all Eudora preferences
for each file share group (right-click on the
group's name and choose Options) and set filtering
options for messages from the file share group (should messages go
through the normal filters or not?) with the ESP Settings button. For
each user, you can specify their role within the group (can they send
updates, only receive updates, or both?). Then, you can share files
across machines and collaborate on any sort of document.
It's pretty amazing and might even convince
non-Eudora users to make the switch (see Figure 6-8).

Figure 6-8. Sharing files with others in your invited group

Also included is a way to send
voice messages via email,
and very powerful
filtering and searching. If
you're a statistics hound,
you'll find a usage stats area (Tools
Statistics) that analyzes that displays statistics, such as how much
time you've spent using the program and the time of
day you send and receive the most messages. Email addicts will love
it (see Figure 6-9).

Figure 6-9. Email usage statistics

An ad-supported version of Eudora is
available for free from http://www.eudora.com.
If you want to do away with the ads, you can either pay $49.95 or
switch to the "light" version,
which lacks some of the program's features.

If you want to amaze friends and acquaintances with little-known technology facts, here's one for you. Eudora was named after the well-known fiction writer Eudora Welty, because of a short story she wrote in 1941, "Why I Live at the P.O.," about a woman who moves to live in her post office.

6.5.2 Move Forward to the Past with Pegasus

If
you're a longtime computer user,
Pegasus may remind
you of your youth, when there were no common interface standards and
a program reflected the personality of individual programmers rather
than focus groups and user interface whizzes. In part,
that's because this program was first released in
1990, in the days of Windows 3.0. Its eccentric layout and tiny icons
will whisk you back in the Wayback Machine to those days gone by.

That is this program's strength and its weakness.
Good luck trying to figure out this program when you first install
it; it's bristling with often-undecipherable icons.
Even the tooltips that appear when you hold your mouse over these
icons don't necessarily help. For example, can
anyone explain to me what "Open a list of local
people on your system" means?

However, the strength is that these eccentricities carry over into
the list of the program's features, and
it's a very powerful program. The ways it handles
rules for how to
automatically process incoming messages are extremely sophisticated.
For example, you can to use it to create a set of rules that would
allow you to automatically allow people to subscribe to listserv
email discussion groups that you run using Pegasus.

Its message-viewing capabilities are
also exceptional. You can choose a view that lets you quickly switch
between displaying an HTML message either as plain text or as
full-blown HTML, and in the "Raw
view" you can see the entire message, including all
the header information showing you the path the email took to reach
you.

There are also some decidedly odd features buried deep in this
program. For example, one feature lets you send an email that
includes preformatted text telling someone they've
received a phone call. Somehow, I don't think that
one came out of a focus group.

Pegasus is free and available from
http://www.pmail.com. If you want manuals and
support, you can pay $29.95.

6.5.3 See Also

If you decide to stick with Outlook but want a way to improve it, try

Nelson's
Email Organizer
(http://www.caelo.com). It offers
ways to manage your email overload better, automatically sorts your
email by putting it into a variety of easy-to-use folders, does
lightning-quick searches on your mail, notifies you when new email
arrives, and lets you view your email with many different views.
It's shareware and free to try, but if you continue
to use it, you are expected to pay $39.95.

Annotis Mail is another Outlook or
Outlook Express add-in (http://www.annotis.com).
It lets you embed pictures, markers, rubber stamps, sticky notes,
sounds, and videos in your email using either Outlook or Outlook
Express. It's shareware and free to try, but if you
continue to use it, you are expected to pay $24.95.