Issue 11
Contents
Features
- | Foreword
- | Pump it up!
- | The 12 Rows of Schoenberg
- | Tripping the MIDI Fandango
- | Tip of the day
- | Mailbox
- | Portfolio Story 1
- | Up for it?
- | Unconventional 2k1 Report
Reviews
- | MyMail 1.50
News
MyMail 1.50 With the powerful freeware e-mail package reaching revision 1.50, Thomas Wellicome looks at the pros and cons MyMail is a mature Atari product which is constantly under revision. Erik Häll's web site features a new version of this popular e-mail package more regularly than all but the most keen of software-hungry Atarians could want. Due to this, most versions of MyMail have been fairly stable running on all ST-compatible systems that have an AES which supports colour icons, AV server support, roughly 2MB of free memory, and a screen mode capable of displaying at least 16 colours on screen. MyMail is compatible with the STiK, STinG and Mint Net connection packages, though it lacks i-Connect support. It is an extremely well-featured e-mailer with a whole host of features, many of which are only available on the Atari in this package.
The main MyMail window with its flashy animated icons.
A welcome feature is the built-in message editor. It certainly feels considerably more professional than running the usual external editor such as Everest, even if it does lack some of the top features that such a package contains. Attachments appear in a nice Outlook-style pane at the bottom of the message, though the method for attaching files isn't immediately obvious, at least to those of us who have manual-reading fears. A right-click on the attachment pane brings up the file selector, allowing you to pick the file you wish to attach. If you have a multi-tasking system such as MagiC or MiNT, the drag-and-drop protocol can be used to attach files or include pasted text within the message window. Similarly the clipboard is supported, though a proper feature for importing text wouldn't go amiss. One nice feature of the message editor is the availability predictive mail address selection. To the uninitiated, this means when you type an address MyMail remembers it, and when you come to type it again up pops a dialog box, with the addresses that match the letters you've typed in so far. This is a nice feature, but the pop-up is chronically slow, a program-wide problem for MyMail which will be discussed later.
MyMail's built-in message editor.
The e-mail address book is a solid feature, allowing quick and easy selection of addresses. Contacts can be viewed by name, alias or address and sorted by alias or name. It's still not as quick to use as NEWSie's address book, but with the predictive mail address selection you're unlikely to use it as much.
MyMail's address book.
Extensive mail downloading facilities are offered, such as mail filtering, deleting of the mail on the server and on multi-tasking systems, background send and receive. The latest feature is spam-filtering, which automatically trashes unwanted mail. MyMail like aMail reviewed last month offers considerable control over the downloading and display of messages. Web addresses can be sent to the web browser, and text colour can be selected for various items in the body of text such as e-mail and web addresses. Fans of emotion icons (emoticons), or smileys will be happy to learn that MyMail has supported graphical versions for the most common for a long time now. Another new feature is vcards, as seen on Outlook on the PC, where details for your contacts can be stored. It's not quite up to the complexity of Outlook 2000's Contacts capability, and the routines for the vcard menu are hideously buggy, so much so that it didn't work on either of the test machines. The author is aware and these problems are sure to get sorted soon. The main problems with the program come from the user interface. It looks relatively pleasant and co-operative at first glance and the animated icons are extremely decadent for an Atari program. However, the program operates in a fixed-sized window which makes it awkward to work with. On lower resolutions the window fills most if not all of the screen, which even with the ability to iconify windows available on most modern multi-tasking systems, is frustrating to use. Even in the higher resolutions available on the Milan and Falcon the inability to resize MyMail's interface makes working with it more difficult than it should be. You cannot, for example, read the whole of the message title, which makes finding specific mail difficult. This is further complicated by the lack of any search options and the mail folder selector which fills up a lot of space. An option to hide this would be useful.
The re-designed program settings dialog featuring the all new spam-filtering abilities.
The icon shortcuts in the main window are of varying degrees of usefulness. Some virtually ignore the basic principles of shortcuts, in that they should be quick routes to commonly-used functions. Editing the colour of text display or configuring preferences are hardly needed every time you run the program, which makes six of the eleven shortcuts available unnecessary. Deleting text is also considerably more complicated than it need be. Clicking the right mouse button and then selecting actions and delete marks the mail as deleted, but then you have to click on the trash can shortcut in permanently delete the mail. Finally there are problems with the pop-up menus and scroll bars, both of which are non-standard, and sluggish and unfriendly to use. The pop-up menus, accessed by clicking on the right button over mail messages, are extremely slow in reacting to user movement on the Falcon, and aren't a lot better on the Milan. Similarly, the scroll bars in the main windows, while having improved considerably from early versions, still don't react as an average GEM user is used to. Couple this with the fact that they are about half the width of the normal scroll bar and you have the recipe for hair-tearing situations. Fortunately a full re-design of the main window is on the author's to-do list. This partly because he plans for news-reading support in future versions of MyMail, which regular users of the program will have been waiting for since the distant days of pre-version 1.00.
Pick a colour, any colour. MyMail's extensive text colour configurations.
Mail downloading is also painfully slow. ST users still trying to get by with an unmodified serial port might as well make a cup of tea if they have a lot of messages to download. Even at top speeds MyMail is not as fast as NEWSie or aMail. Add on the spam and background send and receive features and things become almost unbearable. In an attempt to counteract this the author has added an option to toggle downloading using an option called CGgets, which improves things slightly, but is also incompatible with some TCP/IP stacks. The result of a incompatible stack is a crashed MyMail, as this writer discovered when the Falcon he was using ground to a standstill while trying to upload mail to the popular Atari provider Zetnet. Also, such an obscurely named option which is hidden away in the settings menu is likely to be missed by the average user. Which is a shame really. In conclusion, there is little doubt that MyMail is the most potentially capable freeware e-mailer on the ST-compatible range of machines. All this capability is slightly hampered by MyMail's interface which looks nice but functions poorly. ST owners still struggling along with floppy disks and monochrome monitors are pretty much out of luck really, My Mail is just too slow and lumbering to be any use to you. The new features have also brought a host of new bugs, so earlier versions are probably better for users who need a stable environment. Despite this MyMail is regularly updated and at some point in the future there will be a new interface and the long-awaited news reading features to gasp at. We await the next update with interest.
Summary
Name: | MyMail 1.50
Authors: | Erik Häll
Contact: | http://www2.tripnet.se/~erikhall/index.html
Pros: | Attractive interface in higher resolutions. Many features unmatched in any other freeware e-mailer. Regularly updated.
Cons: | The interface is difficult to work with. Horrifically sluggish at times, even on the Milan. Some nasty and obvious bugs are creeping into recent releases.
Score: |
MyAtari magazine - Review #1, September 2001
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