With all the hype given to IE 4.5 and the new OutLook Express during the Jan MacWorld Expo San Francisco, I thought I'd give 'em a try.
So far, I haven't really done much with IE 4.5. One of the biggest complaints I had with 4.0.x was the way they handled bookmarks. I don't know if MS has rectified this, or what, but I'm going to take a look at it. They seemed to have added an unecessary extra step in the process and made it hard to organize things the way you'd like to.
OutLook Express (OE), though, is another matter.
This program is awesome! (First time I've ever said that about a MS program...make note of it!) I've been a die-hard Claris Emailer 2 user since it came out. Before that I had used Eudora3 and version 2 before that. However, as a person with multiple internet e-mail accounts, I've found that Emailer2 (CE2) has been the best e-mail program by far. Other features that made it a stand-out program are the e-mail filtering options (sending items from email digests to their respective folders, changing their colors, etc.), mail actions (check accounts ever 30 minutes, etc) and the layout.
OE is almost a clone of CE2. I haven't looked at the email actions components yet but in regards to filtering, layout, and functionality, this program may actually be even better than CE2. The contact manager is the best I've seen (and first that is actually usable for me). It even has a built-in e-mail search facility, and it lets you use services like Four11 and others right from within the program. EXTREMELY spiffy!
The look and feel is very much OS 8.5, too. That's one area where CE2 had fallen behind because of the lack of updates. OE makes use of the OS 8.5 Navigation Services, as well as the smart scrolling features (proportional scrollbars) and the cool OS 8 subtle grey dividers (as seen in the finder's list view). Overall, this makes OE the best email program I've seen for the Mac....and it's free!
The only beef I have is OE feels a bit slower for certain things...like deleting files. This may just be simply due to the fact I've only launched it once and it may still be in some initialization mode or something. We'll see. It's not something that would keep me from using it though.
Other programs worth mentioning:
Mushashi 3.0 For those of you who don't know about Mushashi, this is the "spiritual successor" to Emailer. It's a shareware effort to create an enhanced Mac-look-and-feel email program supporting both POP and IMAP protocols for multiple accounts. 3.0 just came out for Japanese systems...and should be out for English systems by now. 2.0 is the last version I used, and it was a very capable, stable program. The interface was nice (if not as nice as CE2's), and from the screenshots I've seen from 3.0, I believe 3.0 will be as nice as CE2, maybe even as nice interface-wise as OE. Worth checking out.
Eudora Pro 4 I haven't used Eudora since version 3. The lack of easily implemented multi-account email killed it for me. I would expect this has been fixed. If you guys have any experience with Eudora Pro, please give us the scoop. It should be a very full-featured program. The filtering options in 3 were excellent, as were the mail actions.
