vanderwal.net

Mail that has problems other than errors

I am giving up on what seems like living in a block of ice, where I can see out and what what is happening but can not communicicate. I have been playing with Web mail that has taken sometime to set up to seemingly work, but I get a humorous error message at logout:

Important! This system is beta and not production-ready. You may experience errors and other problems!

It seems to remember that there are other problems than errors. (?)

I found it very frustrating to use Earthlink/MindSpring on the road. I have many e-mail accounts that I use on a regular basis. Earthlink refused to pull some accounts and blatantly refused to let me send e-mail from any of my e-mail accounts, but the one they own. I stopped using Earthlink months ago for e-mail as it was nothing but spam. I know they don't like people using accounts other than theirs so that they are not the conduit for spam. I just need a usable solution. I have two Web-based accounts and really like Mail2Web, but my favorite account uses a non-standard login that causes outgoing mail to have strange traits on M2W. Yahoo and other accounts are options, but I really like hitting reply in my e-mail client so to keep continuity. This weekend saw many unsent e-mails sitting in my outbox, only to be deleted after it was too late. Suggestions appreciated.

I have been looking for a solid e-mail client for quite some time. I seem to have found one that I really like, MS Entouragge for Mac OS X. Entourage is much farther ahead of Outlook in that you can not only flag an e-mail, but set a reminder in your calendar to come back to that e-mail at a later time. The ability to set categories in addition to rules and other elements is a great help. I find it easy to use and work with.

The competition has left me cold to some degree. Netscape 6(plus) is light years ahead of version 4 (did not allow pulling from multiple e-mail sources), begins to really choke with a couple thousand e-mails in a folder (the downside of being on some wonderful listserves that are full of great information). Outlook Express does not permit archiving. Outlook on Windows has a muddled interface that works well with Exchange and that is not completely a plus.

In all I am very impressed with MS Office on Mac OS X. That is my "productivity tool" of choice. It loads faster and the application does not get in the way of doing what you want it to do, although "Clippy's" cousin is alive and still annoying.

Burried in e-mail? The Wall Street Journal articles discusses how many people handle the deluge of e-mail.

One annoying item with XP for me is the option in the menu on IE6 (in XP) to mail > send a link. This action used to send an attached .url with the e-mail and embed the URL in the text of the e-mail message. Now it only sends that attached .url file. This is problematic for two reasons on is that folks that have their e-mail security turned up do not have access to the .url file. The second reason is there is not a link to copy so that it can be easily pasted in a link page or in a weblog entry. I have spent much time looking for a setting to get the printed out URL sent as a default. The second thing is I can not find my PhotoShop 5.5 CDROM so to reload the program. I do not seem to have it at home any longer. ARG!!! I found my activation string while searching for the disk, but not the disk.