On Feb 21, 2013, at 1:36 PM, William D. Bandes wrote: > We hope you're still "listening," > Chris!
I am indeed still here. I didn't have much to contribute to this thread having stopped using Emailer back in the beginning of 2006 when I bought my first Intel based iMac (the first one Apple released). I tried using Emailer for a few weeks under SheepShaver but it was just too much of a pain to do. I've been using Apple's Mail for my primary mail client since I moved over. I think I may have tried a few others briefly but ultimately found that everything was enough different from Emailer and none of them were really better, so I just stuck with Apple's Mail knowing it would be supported going forward and easily integrated into their other iApps. I started using Emailer around 98 or 99 I think (I know I was a user for the y2k issues that jud passed around the info on how to hack in a fix until Apple officially fixed it). I stopped using Emailer in 2006 (probably right around this time of year since I ordered the iMac they day they went on sale). So that means I've now not been using Emailer for just about as long as I had been using Emailer. And now, since this is a list of Emailer lovers that know nothing else is ever quite the same… <rant> Last year I had MS Outlook on the Mac forced on me for my work email. I don't like it. It is not very stable (although it is more stable than MS Communicator which I was also forced over to and is more stable than it was when I started using it last year and it crashed every other day), it gets confused easily when I use a VPN forcing me to quit and relaunch it. It opens email in a separate window far too easily (I'm sure some how I'm making it think I double clicked it, but it happens way too often for it to really be a complete user error), and when you delete the email, the stand alone window copy of it remains open (unlike Apple's Mail where it closes the window when you delete the underlying email message). Outlook does not support manually quoting text (at least not that I have found, I admit I only briefly looked, but if it is there it isn't obvious), which means inline quoting of an email is harder as you have to quote the entire email, then do a bunch of fancy returns and backspaces to add text in the middle (this has caused me to give up and just do its reply on top that it insists on doing despite the fact that I still think that is a bad way to reply to an email). And finally, my two biggest peeves with Outlook, one, it does not mark a message as read until after you click OFF the message. Clicking on it and viewing it and reading it is not enough, you have to actually either open it in a separate window (which I don't like to do any more, I like the single window view these days, I already use 3 monitors covered with windows, I don't need an extra window opening just so show me the same email I can read in Outlook's main window) or you have to click or arrow to a different email to mark the previous one as read. This seems to carry over all too often to when you look at a new email, read it, then click delete. It moves it to the trash, but often leaves it in an unread state showing unread emails in my trash (and always does that when I accept meeting invites). And then number two, my single biggest "I freaking hate Outlook" feature… its overly aggressive spell checker. In Apple's Mail if you misspell a work, it auto corrects it if it can. If you didn't want the correction, you can backspace, spell it wrong again, and it will leave it wrong. In Outlook you are screwed, it will just keep on auto correcting until you either turn off auto correct or add the misspelling to an override dictionary. Part of this same auto correct will adjust things like underlines before a word turning the word to italics, asterisk before a word makes it bold. These are amazingly annoying features when I write emails containing necessary acronyms, internal terms, and file or script names that regularly contain underscore or asterisk characters. Things like "to fix your problem run the following: my_fixer_script.sh /path/allfiles*.txt… this will result in the underscores being removed, "fixer" being in italics, the asterisk being removed, and ".txt" being bold… to get around it I have to turn off the feature or type the text in a text editor and copy and paste in into outlook. And yes, I can turn off the bold and italic auto correct without turning everything else off, but the fact that it is an all or nothing even for that portion of the auto correct is still annoying. I admit Apple's Mail has spoiled me by auto correcting and then paying attention to the fact that I changed it back to the old text and leaving it alone. It lets me leverage auto correct for most of what I do and then easily override it when I know it is "wrong" and I want it that way. </rant> -chris <www.mythtech.net>
