Wednesday 4 June 2003

Pic of the day: Waiting, waiting for the mail ... (Or perhaps just enjoying some fresh air, unlikely as that may seem for me.)

Operamail M2

I really liked Forte Agent. I started with Free Agent, and later bought the full version so I could have mail along with the newsreader. Forte has bought back Agent a while ago and are doing a decent job on it. I really like the interface, and I have collected a lot of stuff there over the years. But there comes a time to say goodbye to a childhood friend. And this was a friend from the childhood of the Internet. But we are at childhood's end now. More precisely, the flood of adult mail and other spam.

I downloaded the newest version of Agent, and it still does not have message-content based filtering, as far as I could find out from the documentation. This was one redeeming feature of MS Outlook in my opinion: It was fairly easy to filter by content. But Outlook is the target for almost all virus coders. Even though I use it with caution, it is simply too dangerous. And I use Opera as my browser anyway. So today I have taken the plunge. Operamail M2 it is.

Opera is a small, fast browser that is nuts about following standards. (Probably comes from the fact that one of the guys who made Opera also made some of the standards, such as CSS.) However, unlike the two bloatware browsers, Opera is not entirely free. If you don't buy a license, you have to deal with an advertisement banner at the top. You can customize it to show the type of advertising you want, and I kinda liked it, but still, it takes away space. Back before I bought my license for Opera, I would switch to full-screen mode (F11) when I did not care to watch the ads. Yeah, it is kinda cheating, but some ads can be kinda distracting. Especially if they blink.

Now that I use Opera anyway, only my old love for Forte Agent has kept me from setting up Opera for mail and Usenet too. I have tried it for Usenet and I definitely think Agent is better for that. I have not yet quite decided whether to switch newsgroups to Opera yet, but I am trying. The mail is definitely up.

***

M2, the second mail client from Opera, comes with a spam filter that has 3 levels of severeness. I have put mine to strongest, and it seems to work so far. Of course, almost all the mail I get is spam, so it may not be a realistic test. But it should work for most people. You see, if you write to people, they are automatically added to your contact list, and thus all mail from them is routed away from the Spam folder. You can also manually "whitelist" people with a "not spam" command before you empty the rest of the Spam folder into the trashcan. And even at the strongest setting, it will not pick the most innocent looking spam. (That is pretty hard to do too, as they do their darnedest to impersonate friend mail: A human looking sender, a chatty subject header, even the actual text should be acceptable to most churchgoers unless you actually click on the links.) As you mark your friends mail, however, any mail from other people will start to stand out already in the overview window.

Spam was my foremost concern, but the mail module is interesting also as a concept. It does away with folders as such. All mail (unless deleted) is kept in a central database. You access this head-on or through "views". These views are like folders, but you do not actually move the message. You just route it to a view, either automatically or through filters you have defined yourself. The same message can show up in different views, if it fills the requirements of several filters. You can create views ad hoc by doing a search in the mail base. The result will show up in a new view window, which will be kept for future use unless you actively discard it. So if you search your message base for all mails containing "vacation", you will have a Vacation view until further notice. Again, this does not affect the appearance of these messages in other views.

You can also label incoming mail with certain categories, probably useful for the work environment, such as "to do" or a project name. I don't expect to do that. Again, these things put handles on your mail, so you can pick it up from the big container where it is all lying around together. It works well so far ... but of course, I have mostly got spam so far today. The only exception so far is a mail from Fictionwise.com, reminding me that this is the last week of their anniversary rebate sale.

(I buy most of my books from Fictionwise, which is a specialized e-book shop. They sell e-books for a wide range of hardware and software, and quite a bit of generic titles readable on almost anything. I rarely buy paper books anymore. I would need a larger apartment, or getting rid of some existing books. You all know how hard it is to take farewell with a book, I suppose, so you may understand my preference for electronic books. After all, one burned CD can contain a small library ... in case you don't just trust Fictionwise to stay online and keep your books in your virtual bookshelf.)

Be that as it may, I don't consider Fictionwise mail spam. It is definitely solicited. I have set up a detailed list of what I want them to alert me about. This includes my favorite authors, and all new discounts. Well, this week all their books are discounted, so they should definitely mail me. I added them to my contact list, and the mail immediately disappeared from the Spam view and appeared in a Fictionwise sub-view under contacts. After I bought a book, the e-mail receipt was automatically added to this same view.

You can select how long you want to look at a mail before it is marked as read. (I almost did not find this, but it was under View in the action bar.) For some reason, the default is "never" ... you have to tick off each mail or press K to mark it. I set it to 10 seconds. You can always mark them unread again if you must.

***

Usenet newgroups will show up in the same interface as mail, if you have selected a news account. Each newsgroup will have its separate view. You can choose whether you want to see only unread messages, all messages, or messages downloaded the last day, week, month, quarter, or year. You can sort messages by thread or flat by one the fields, such as date.

(This also applies to mail, but is particularly useful for newsgroups and mailing lists. Yes, the program will automatically detect mailing lists if they follow common standards. Too bad I was kicked off the only mailing list I enjoyed, a diary list, presumably because I was not American. I never got any explanation, but none of my Norwegian mail accounts was accepted after the fall 2001.)

As for my own mailing list, incidentally, only one person so far has joined my notify list. That's OK, I don't really have mailing list software yet, so it might not show up right in M2 even if you have it. And you just might consider getting it. Opera is a good browser, and M2 is a good mail reader, easy to use and doing the usual stuff. Recommended so far.