E-mail Alternatives

If viruses and other threats targeting Outlook and Outlook Express have you looking for a safer e-mail alternative, start here....

Introduction
There's no denying: Outlook and Outlook Express are the most popular e-mail clients in the computing world. Unfortunately, this simple fact, along with their disturbing tendency to be, at least in some iterations, full of security holes, makes them favorite targets of hackers and virus authors. You never know whether an e-mail attachment from someone -- possibly even someone you know -- is real, or whether it is one of over 50,000 known Windows viruses (or "virii," if you prefer) just waiting to erase your data or wreak other havoc on your system.

Yes, this is a Windows-centric article. All you Linux and Mac users may go back to your laughing and finger-pointing. The fact is, I've become so paranoid about viruses in my e-mail -- and I get so many of them, truly justifying that paranoia -- that I began the research for this article out of a sense of sheer necessity. I wanted to find a viable alternative for handling my e-mail chores. Let's begin with a look at what I consider the most important features to look for.

In approximate order of their priority:

1. I want it to be safe. I want to minimize my security risks, yet still retain the ability to run all the Windows apps I use in my day-to-day business.
2. I want the email client to be elegant and easy to use, with a practical, functional interface.
3. I want it to be able to help me deal with the growing mountain of junk mail "spam" that floods my email inbox every day.
4. I would like it to be reasonably priced, or preferably, free.
5. I want it to effectively deal with the different email accounts and protocols (e.g., POP3, IMAP, etc.) my various accounts use.

Here are the programs I put to the test in Phase 1:

Running on Windows XP: Pegasus 4.02, Outlook 2002, Outlook Express 6, AquaMail, Eudora 5.2, Imail Webmail, Hotmail.

For my first round of tests, I installed each email program and then attempted to access two accounts: one POP3 account, and an IMAP account. The latter account had over 1,000 messages -- many of them spam -- and several server-based email boxes.

Phase 1 Test results
For the benefit of those who appreciate an article that cuts to the chase, here's a summary of how my first round of tests ended up, with most satisfactory solution at the top, and least worthy at the bottom of the list:

1. Outlook 2002 - Automatically enabled Windows Messenger for Instant Messaging, MS Word for advanced email composition and formatting support, spelling, etc. Could open some "doc object" attachments other clients (including Outlook Express) could not. Excellent threading capabilities. Junk mail, Adult content and attachment filtering. (3.5 out of 5)
2. Outlook Express - Attractive interface, fast. Automatically enabled Windows Messenger for Instant Messaging, provided spelling checker, attachment filtering. (3 out of 5)
3. Pegasus - Very fast POP mail access, free. A bit ugly, which I was prepared to live with. But IMAP performance was dog-slow -- every time I changed IMAP folders and then returned to the original folder, it went back to the server and reloaded all 1000 messages! That's a deal-breaker for me, unfortunately. (3 out of 5)
4. Hotmail - Slow, tended to be very poor at filtering spam (Wired News calls it a "spammer's paradise"), even with the junk mail filter turned on. (2.5 out of 5). Some people find Yahoo Mail, which I haven't yet tested extensively, to be slightly superior.
5. Eudora 5.2 - A bit complicated, but the worst problem was the fact that email sort-by-date functions didn't seem to work properly. As well, mail I wanted to read sometimes arrived, then mysteriously vanished. Other email programs could see the mail (which was sent from a Mac, although I can't see why that should matter here), but Eudora couldn't. Even stranger: one message I sent to a test account was somehow merged in with a piece of junk mail, creating a message with the junk mail's subject line and my HTML text content and inline binary code. This same message opened correctly on all other email clients -- clearly there is a flaw in Eudora 5.2's interpretation of message header information.  And I couldn't find a way to rename the mailbox (for unknown reasons) named <dominant>. I also found the icons and their counter-intuitive placement rather confusing. The mail filtering capabilities, while powerful, are similarly daunting to master, with separate "inbox," "outbox" and "manual" modes. It all seemed a bit unfriendly to me. (2 out of 5)
6. iMail Webmail - I'm generally very pleased with the iMail Server as an IMAP/POP mail server, but it web mail feature has an annoying tendency to crash if attachments bigger than a few hundred K are downloaded. That's another deal-breaker. (1 out of 5)
7. AquaMail - I couldn't get this one to work at all -- something about an ActiveX initialization problem. Next! (0 out of 5)

Clearly, I seemed to be getting nowhere. The two most satisfactory products were the two very products I was trying to get away from.

It should also be mentioned that, during the course of my tests, I was running Grisoft's AVG on one of my test machines, and McAfee VirusScan 7.0 on the other. Both machines caught several virus-infected email attachments that had been sent to me. However, AVG also reported no less than four virus infections on my hard drive. All were Trojan-type worms, embedded in web pages I had visited, or embedded in email I had received and stored without opening. This horrifying discovery only strengthened my resolve to find a safer alternative email system.

So, I started looking farther afield. If the viruses target Windows and Outlook, I reasoned, I'll cut those pieces out of the equation. Mail.app in Mac OS X 20.2 Jaguar seemed promising. Obviously, it requires all-new hardware and thus might not be a viable option for many users, but I gave it a go, anyway. I also tried Entourage -- part of Microsoft's Office suite for Mac -- and the mail composer feature in Mozilla, the open-source version of Netscape. Here's how they stacked up:

Mail.app - Good interface overall, but a bit slow. Good junk mail filtering. A few minor quirks. I found that leaving Mail.app open on the Mac and then accessing the (same) IMAP email account on a PC allowed the Mac's junk mail filter pre-filter the spam out of my PC's inbox -- neat! It's a bit feature-poor compared to almost any PC-based email program you care to name: no read receipts, no mail priorities, no support for doc objects. And no Windows viruses, other than those pesky Word macro viruses that don't actually target the Mac, but can still be transmitted by one. (4 out of 5) (5 out of 5 if you already own a Mac)

Mozilla Mail (tested under Lycoris Desktop/LX) - Moderately complicated IMAP configuration, good text/layout editor, good interface, many security options. Manual filtering setup. (4 out of 5)

Entourage.X (Mac OS X) - Slow, somewhat confusing interface for junk mail management. Excellent threading capabilities. (3.5 out of 5)

Phase 2 Results
All three of the phase 2 apps were better than any of the items 3-7 in the phase 1 test. Only Entourage seemed to offer features comparable to the capabilities of the Microsoft Outlook family of mail applications in Windows. The automatic junk mail filtering of Apple's Mail.app was the easiest to set up, and it's interface the most pleasing -- albeit the least feature-rich -- of the three. Mozilla Mail was the email alternative easiest to implement on my existing Windows machine. I decided to pursue further tests of Mozilla Mail and Netscape 7.01.

As these tests progressed, I also conducted further testing of Mail.app on the Mac, and began scouting around for an easy was to install KMail on my Linux box. While I was looking, I came across Sylpheed for Linux. This program is a fairly faithful clone of Outlook Express for Linux and it works extremely well, with most of the things I liked about Outlook Express present -- but with few of the drawbacks. Its manual filtering setup requirement and lack of support for HTML mail in its internal editor were the only obvious limitations (external editors, however, can easily address the latter issue). Still, it rates an easy 3.5 out of 5.

Despite the attractive qualities of these and other email clients for Mac and Linux, I gave the premise of running a non-Windows email client a little more thought and came to the conclusion that, despite their possible advantages, there were just too many drawbacks (not the least of which was the impracticality of running my demanding Windows apps on the same machine, cool hacks such as Win4Lin notwithstanding) to seriously consider a non-Windows-based mail app. I set about looking at a wide range of lesser known Windows email clients.

Read on for these and other tests and the final conclusion.....