04-12-2011, 01:37 PM

This subject must have been done to death somewhere on mac-forums. However, I can't find the answer to my question.

Email is about 80% of my activity, 15% is web access in support of email, and the rest is games and such. Yeah, I've done okay with Windows but for somewhat complicated reasons I need to be out of the mainstream and Win 98 is coming to an end as an increasing number of sites either lecture me about the need to upgrade or flatly refuse to talk.

I do a lot of email -- 100-200 (mostly very brief) replies daily is common. TheBat has been excellent, but it appears there is no Bat for Mac.

So ... what do the email-serious Mac folks use? At a quick glance Apple mail looks minimal, like 'okay for normal family stuff, but ...' Eudora may not exactly still exist? Pegasus ... that was a good one while it lasted -- was there ever a Mac version? Web-based mail is out -- we've never had good broadband here and there's no prospect of it getting better soon, so I need to be able to do dial-up from time to time and during power failures.

I can of course do email on the Win 98 machine and the rest using a Mac, but a clipboard interface is extremely useful.

If there is already a considerable email discussion somewhere, just point me at it!

Thanks!

04-12-2011, 01:48 PM

Your post was moved to a more appropriate forum where you will likely get more response.

Have you considered using a service which provides both local email and web email? You can tie Google Mail (GMail) to Apple Mail very nicely and even set it up as IMAP if you wish.

If you still have a Win machine that you use, one of the best free email clients is Thunderbird from Mozilla. It's also cross platform friendly with versions for the Mac and Linux in addition to Windows. Thunderbird is also an excellent news reader.

Still using Win 98...?

04-12-2011, 04:12 PM

Thanks for the quick answer; I will d/l T'bird and check it out.

'Free' is nice, but not required: A good mail client for $100 is doable; a good computer for $2500 -- even $1000 -- is out of the question. Fortunately I don't do the kind of CPU-intensive applications for which multi-gHz machines are needed.

I have and will keep Win machines available but the plan is to convert 99% of the work to Mac if possible. I now have two free-from-the-recycle-center Mac desktops and on the strength of general success with those, have bought a G4 iBook on eBay. Total expenditure so far <$300. The iBook comes with Panther install disks but will need a memory upgrade (800 mHz but only 128m). I think that will be about it.

I'm going to be chuckling all day about the analogy posted somewhere on this forum that compares Windows to a wonderful airliner that has live in-flight entertainment, dinner service from a 100-page menu, but explodes in flight. Could only have been written by someone who had flown Windows ...

Mostly in-flight explosions happen only with certain destinations. You just learn which tickets not to buy.

The main reasons for Win 98 are that it performs well on the older machines I can afford and has been out of the mainstream for several years.

04-12-2011, 05:39 PM

Well, Thunderbird is out for the time being: It downloads as a corrupt image and will not mount.

I don't know enough about that problem or Macs to have any idea how to troubleshoot it. What I do know is that once a particular program does it, it will do it every time I download it. It does not, however, happen with Mac downloads (system updates, manuals) or certain others -- Asteroid Storm was just fine, ditto Camino and AbiWord.

04-12-2011, 07:11 PM

Solved it by using a very sofizteekated technique: Googling the 'corrupt disk image' message. With just a little reading between the lines it became clear that this is how OS 10.3 reports the error it gets when you download software designed for OS 10.4 as is T'bird 3.6.

An elementary error, made easier by the fact that software suppliers routinely say 'works on OS X' leaving it to you to know that you must check WHICH OS X they mean.

Anyway, Thunderbird 2.0.0.24 is installed and works. One day I'll know enough to get through the account options on the first try but at least I can do it after enough banging on the thing.

Thanks for the suggestion; we'll see how it goes.

04-13-2011, 06:59 PM

Well ...

T'bird turned out to be rather a pig -- like a sizable fraction of a second to delete a message? And it isn't exactly over-endowed, feature wise.

On to Eudora. Or rather, Eudora 'classic' since Eudora is currently being rewritten as a pretty face for ... THUNDERBIRD. Eudora installed easily, has all the features I need, I was thinking I was pretty smart after all. Then I discovered just one more feature ...

Most of the bulk of the mail I handle in a day -- maybe 100-200 emails -- comes from Yahoo Groups. These messages can be distinguished (by Yahoo Group name) by '[groupname]' at the beginning of the subject line so that's how I filter them, routing each group's messages to its own folder. It appears, however, that Eudora strips anything in square brackets at the beginning of the subject line before allowing filters to see it.

I found a mention of this topic -- with FAILURE to strip described as a possible bug -- for something called Penelope. What? A shortage of entropy is now a problem for data processing?

Maybe I have missed something? Off to the Eudora forums to ask ... but they've detonated the open source conversion bomb over there: There are forums that are nominally for 'classic' but contain essentially nothing and others for the open source version that are devoted to open source topics. This Is Not The Time To Be Learning Eudora Classic.

If there's any suggestion about this issue, where to go to ask about Eudora, or another mailer for OS 10.3, I'd sure be delighted to hear it.