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I'm surprised at the state of email clients today.
Here is one area where I actually WANT companies to add functionality, which they seem keen on doing needlessly to so many other products. Of course the functionality I want is not necessarily what they are interested in providing.

To me, the issue is how to manage thousands of emails for dozens of different accounts, both in terms of being able to use multiple different email addresses to send mail as well as being able to easily filter incoming mail into appropriate folders, and to handle spam (by automatically identifying it and putting it in a Junk Mail folder).

I find Outlook Express for MacOS 9 actually handles most of these tasks quite well. It has no problem with me using multiple email "from" addresses, and makes it easy to configure and select them. It has nice built-in features for automatically dealing with mailing lists, as well as pretty good filtering. Its built-in spam detection is also quite good.

My main complaints are that I can't figure out how to write a filter that will catch these cases: where there is no name for the "from" or "to" field. That is, it (usually) has an email address, but the display name is blank.

e.g. in

"Foo Bar"
Foo Bar is the display name. The main spam that the combination of OE and my custom filters doesn't catch is where there is no display name.

The other drawback to OE is that there is no MacOS X version :(

Other than that it does pretty much all I could ask of an email application. Does anyone have experience with the new Entourage app in MS Office X? Does it have similar functionality? (I have Office X, but I haven't installed it.)

Anyone have any other fave programs? I was considering BareBones Software's MailSmith because I am a big fan of BBEdit, but I read in a review somewhere that you can't set it to filter based on your address list (e.g. "email from people in my address list should always go into my personal folder, never be classified as junk email"). I suppose that's a feature request one could make.

And then of course there's Eudora.
And with OS X all of the standard UNIX email possibilities open up.

What are you using for email and spam management?

posted by Richard at 11:33 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)