General

Thinking Outside The (Windows) Box,
Part 3: Free Mail Clients—Qualcomm Eudora, and Conclusion

While many businesses depend on Microsoft and its various product suites, alternatives exist, some of which are not well known. Part three of this series examines free e-mail clients.

by Lisa Phifer VP Core Competence, Inc. [March 2, 2006]

Eudora 7 runs on Windows 98/2000/Me/XP/NT4 and Mac OS X in three modes. Light Mode runs without ads, SpamWatch, spellcheck, or toolbar customization, but is limited to one mailbox.

Qualcomm Eudora www.eudora.com Qualcomm San Diego, CA

Paid Mode ($49.95) adds multiple mailboxes and one year of support to those features. Free Sponsored Mode is similar to Paid Mode, but displays a 1.5" square ad and disables Fast Search, BossWatch, and SpamWatch. We reviewed Sponsored Mode, since we think that most readers will choose it over Light Mode, but you can switch between modes at any time.

Eudora supports POP3, IMAP, and SMTP, with options for SSL/TLS and just about any authentication method, including passwords, CRAM-MD5, APOP, RPA, and Kerberos. We used PGP with earlier releases, but were pleased to find S/MIME in Eudora 7 for message signing and encryption. To use S/MIME, download the DLL to your plug-in directory, then use IE to add certificates for yourself and others. You can obtain free certificates from Thawte or Verisign.

Eudora's message viewer supports basic HTML, with an option to use Apple QuickTime or Internet Explorer for more complex messages, like those containing Java, JavaScript, and ActiveX. For safety, an option can block executables. ScamWatch flags deceptive URLs and warns you before running executable attachments. You must use IE settings to disable Javascript, etc.

Eudora provides what you'd expect from a commercial mail client, including text formatting, in-line spellcheck, prioritization, labeling, address book, and customized toolbars. It can also use LDAP, Finger, or Ph to look up users in Bigfoot, 411, and other databases. When you run Eudora, all personas share one set of folders (including Inbox). Folders can also be shared with invited network users via the Eudora Sharing Protocol.

Filters can be used to direct mail to specific folders—or organize messages into folders representing mailing lists, etc.. However, Eudora uses physical folders, not the virtual views found in Thunderbird or Opera. Message filters are created through a graphical interface that can be seeded by asking Eudora to match a selected message; more complex filters can easily test any header field or body text (see figure at right).

Eudora offers many advanced features, some of which are present in Sponsored Mode. For example, Content Concentrator takes messages associated with a thread and boils them down to a single file by stripping headers, quotes, and signatures. Statistics make it easy to eyeball received, sent, and junk message rates over selectable periods (see figure below).

Eudora's basic Find function is relatively quick, but Eudora 7 (paid mode) adds a Fast Search that uses message indexing to run 20 to 100 times faster (see figure below). Another Paid Mode incentive is SpamWatch, a heuristic junk filter that requires little user training to correctly differentiate between junk and commercial mail that you intended to receive. We would rather not use Eudora without SpamWatch, but if you want a free mail client that includes junk filtering, you have several other options.

Free and commercial plug-ins can be downloaded from Qualcomm Premium Services. For example, Microsoft Agent is a text-to-speech engine that reads message subjects and senders. Eudora has been around a long time with a published plug-in API, so third-party helper programs exist. But ultimately, Eudora is commercial software, so don't expect the wealth of extensions available for open source clients. On the other hand, even Eudora Light feels like commercial product, and Sponsored Mode strikes a good balance between ads and features.

Conclusion
These are just a few of the many free mail clients that small businesses and individuals can use instead of Outlook Express. Of course, larger businesses can also use these clients, but are more likely to use commercial clients for application suite integration, robustness, and tech support. If your employer lets you choose your own POP/IMAP client, you can probably check your mail with any of these clients, but do verify SSL/TLS ciphersuite and authentication compatibility.

As discussed in Part 1 of this series, there are pros and cons associated with using alternative mail clients. ISPs that recommend mail clients to their customers may want a simple, clean user interface to reduce customer support. Business users may want a client that provides PGP or S/MIME signing and encryption. Most of us want clients that can help us manage spam and reduce mail-mailing worm and phishing vulnerability. Look and feel preferences are highly subjective, so take these clients out for a test drive and decide for yourself what's most important (and most comfortable) for you.

In Part 4, we will conclude this series with a brief look at free personal firewall programs that can help keep Internet intruders at bay when you're checking mail or surfing the web.

—End