I use four email programs. My main account is monitored with Eudora, the now-deceased email program from Qualcomm. It's charm is that it separates attachments from email and when we had a real surge in virii a few years back, it was the one email program that didn't lose all of its email to an over-enthusiastic anti-virus program like Norton Anti-Virus. NAV's solution to most things was just to nuke the WHOLE inbox. That sort of made Outlook and even Thunderbird risky.
A few years back Mozilla's Thunderbird developed the same ability to separate attachments. That was worth trying, so I set up my other two accounts on it. Subsequently, I have added six other accounts, for a total of eight, to the burden for Thunderbird. No complaints with the current version at all. I could very well use it for the main account too. But I am incredibly lazy. Why move things over when I've got Eudora in that sweet spot of doing everything I want it too?
Those of you who love Eudora, should know that a successor called Odysseus in the works. It's a for-pay program available very shortly at the infinity datasystems site. There's also an attempt to graft the Eudora theme onto Thunderbird called Penelope. It's not that far along, but you can watch for it.
The third email option I use isn't in fact, an email program. It's a site, gmail.com. This is the web-mail arm of Google and it still requires an invitation to get in. Those invites used to be bribery gold. You had a few to hand out, and lots of friends wanting a browser email program, accessible anywhere there's a computer, with 1G of storage space. That's since doubled (at least) and been matched by other services like Hotmail and Yahoo, but back then, it was mouth-salivating desirable. It's a goto email address for me, used to get around certain problems. Unfortunately, gmail REALLY hates zipped file attachments and that's more impediment than I'd like.
Finally, there's the little maitre-d that I use for all of my downloadable email. PopTray is a free, open source program that can do MOST of the job of an email program, but in fact sits in my system tray downloading headers all day long.
Now, downloading headers is a LOT safer than downloading content. Especially if you get spam. REALLY especially if you get LOTS of spam. It's been a life saver at places that are getting bombed. With PopTray, you can download all the headers. Say you have 100 emails, only one of which is an email from somebody you are interested in.
Highlight them all (ctrl-A). Control-Click on the one you don't want to make go away. Hit the delete button. Poof. 99 emails go away. You then start your REAL email program and download the one you want. Total time, maybe a couple of minutes. And in the meantime, you haven't got your email program running full-time, taking lots of memory and resources. And no downloading spam with gigantic headers or pictures. That takes time and bandwidth and poses potential problems.
In fact, PopTray CAN be more than just a header browser. If you see one of the messages and can't decide spam or no, you can just preview the message's raw text. That will help with the decision. And if the email is a simple one that doesn't need reply, just reading, you can preview and discard as if it was spam. No loading the email program AT ALL.
There is MORE! You can write automatic rules for deleting spam that saves the highlight and delete process. The rules are easy to create, just a right click and two more menu choices. And the rules system has some power.
And there's the rub. Too much power. I got a little rule crazy and started writing more and more aggressive rules. One I wrote didn't test out so good. Somehow, it started deleting any email I got that included RE: plus a fairly common other circumstance (people in the CC'd field). It took me forever to figure this out. The missing emails from the past month or two are long gone.
So, I went and deleted all the rules. My 40 spams per email box zoomed back up to 100. Still it doesn't take long to do the highlight, ctrl-click on the keepers and delete routine. I think I'm going to go without rules for awhile to see if I can stand seeing all those headers.
You can download PopTray at the program's website.
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