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I’m slowly trying to divorce myself from Microsoft and overdependancy on their software. But somehow along the way, I’ve kinda hit a stumbling block notably with email clients.

For the unitiated, email clients are programs you use to check your email. Hotmail, yahoo! mail, Hushmail and the like don’t count as the messages are physically stored on a server in the land of far-far-away™. Clients are normally used to access POP mail like Uni email accounts ect. but technically you could use email clients to access (free) webmail like Outlook Express does with Hotmail.

I previously used Outlook Express to check my university mail. So far so good, I had no immediate problems then. However, the problem lay in archiving my mails. First of all, OE stores emails on some obscure folder in the C: drive under %usrprofiles%. Wahey, formatting and reinstalling stuff and the subsequent archive restoring was a pain in the bum indeed. It doesn’t help that the built-in import/export facility sucks ass. You can only import from a limited number of pre-installed programs on your computer. If you asked me, descriptively it is more like “migrating” than importing!

Oh well, in the search for a suitable replacement I tested Thunderbird m0.5 (Firefox’s trusty standalone mail-client sidekick from Mozilla), Eudora 6.0.3 and PMail 4.12a. To be honest, none were suitable replacements for OE. They all had shortcomings in one department or another. I’ll elaborate…

Thunderbird, has not even reached version 1.0 yet. It has still many bugs to iron out and even more features to add. The import facility sucked balls too. You could only import from PROGRAMS like OE did. It didn’t help that my OE archives were in propretiary MiKrO$oFT .dbx format (which really, REALLY sucks balls). So I trashed TB because thought it could function as a mail client, it didn’t go very far in getting my existing mail sorted out.

Mail client deux started out alright… until I realised that the whole she-bang was ad-supported. Eudora’s functionality was OK-lar... but not fantastic. It didn’t scream “use me!” at all. The import facility also sucked balls. Note to everybody reading this (if this ever means anything to you lah): Stay away from OE as you are going to lose your archives eventually when you migrate away from that devil spawn of a program!

Last but not least, PMAIL. Man Uni uses PMAIL on its clusters and stores mail on each user’s P:/ drive. OE did a wonderful job at keeping my P Drive pristine as by default, the “keep messages on server” option isn’t ticked. Meaning? You get to read emails at home, but not anywhere else. Lose the emails on your computer and voila… no more email archive! Anyhoo, I had PMAIL running on my box for a bit and though it took quite a while to set everything up (like importing .dbx files into .mbx files) I guessed things were alright… but were they?

I still lose out on archiving my Hotmail account. Which REALLY sucks. So it’s back to OE it is!

Moral of the story: When Bill Gates has your life grabbed by its balls, its going to take a hell of alot of effort to shake the bugger off. Note to self: Must email university to get HTML accessable mail ala Imperial College & UEA!

So what email client do YOU use?

EDIT 15:10pm: Solution to archiving? Use OE like usual, but then create a batch file with instructions to copy all *.dbx files from the %AppData% folder to an archive folder residing somewhere in D: Then use dbxconv to convert all the files to .mbx format which is easily exportable. Repeat and rinse as necessary. Email me or leave a comment with your email if you are wanting a sample of what the import.bat file looks like. End of story! Hmm… now to try and vbasic hack this functionality into OE itself…