Re: BBLISA: Good PC IMAP client?

[Betsy Schwartz]

Thanks for all the replies! More input very welcome!

Our help desk team is small and quite savvy, but overloaded. Email configuration is not something they want to do a lot *more* of. But, Netscape and Eudora bugs have been a real time sink lately. Eudora IMAP frequently garbles mime attachments[1] and it has some sort of weird bug where it eats the inbox if it gets Asian-language SPAM. Ate mine last week. (I had backups, but still)

Netscape was a problem before my time here. The helpdesk manager went through the drill of switching everyone *off* Netscape, after some corrupted mailbox incidents, and does not want to go back. Our boss wants to switch people who complain about Eudora back to Netscape. HDM doesn't want to go in circles. And of course, there's some ancient app somewhere that has some subset of users stuck on Netscape 4.7. (and again, Mac users are happy as clams.)

Most of our users are pretty darn savvy at using design software, but there's a large subset who aren't that good at doing PC systems stuff and they're the ones we see. You know, the 20/80 rule. And, there's the administrative staff. This being a design school, all of our users have to send all sorts of large image file attachments around. And just to make life fun, all of our student users have one or more of their own PC's which they are encouraged, no, *required* to plug into our network and manage themselves. (don't ask me about viruses...)

Taking a quick look, I think Pine would never fly here because it is text-based with text-base dot file configuration, and our users are completely GUI-oriented. One of the interesting things about working at a design school is, well, appearance counts. A *lot*. Interface quality counts too. It can be fast and powerful as hell but if it looks ugly and requires manual tinkering, it's not going to fly. Evolution looks pretty - but not for PC? I'll try Mulberry but that "run screaming" has me worried.

hee, maybe the question should have been not "what do you LIKE" but "what keeps the end-users happy and quiet"

Hmm, forgot to list LDAP as a requirement. LDAP's going to be my next question...

thanks, Betsy

[1] the fix seems to be to go into Tools/Options/Incoming/Server Configuration:IMAP/ and set For New Mail Download Attachments except size to [32767], if it's happening to anyone here


Betsy Schwartz email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Unix Systems Administrator,CRG voice: 617-495-5947
Harvard Graduate School of Design fax: 617-496-5866




---
Send mail for the `bblisa' mailing list to `[EMAIL PROTECTED]'.
Mail administrative requests to `[EMAIL PROTECTED]'.