Hello,
I've been using The Bat! (ver. 1.47) for 5 days by now, and here I'd
like to share some impressions, concerns, and wishes.
Before, I used earlier evaluation versions for a short time back in
1998, so I can see how it has developed. I like the program; however,
there are still lots of missing things, as well as things I (and probably
others) need.
1) People usually say of The Bat! as being very fast. With our setup
here (~80 folders with both corporate and my personal mail, some of
them having 5000+ messages per folder), it is _slower_ (?!!) than
Outlook Express 5.5. It is especially slow when entering big folders,
re-sorting, compressing, etc. (No advices like "Make your folders
smaller", please. We need our big mail archives organized this way,
and we need a mailer capable of handling them.)
2) All that said, The Bat! seems to have a smaller memory footprint
than OE. Does it mean that the developers have _purposely_ chosen
lower memory utilization vs. speed? Is it planned to have any
options/switches/whatever, which would allow me, for example, to have
The Bat! working faster at the expense of TB! eating all of my virtual memory?
2) It produces access violations quite often (several times a day), in
various situations (but usually when working in big folders). (I use
it under Windows 2000 Professional SP1 on Pentium 233MMX with 64 MB of
RAM).
3) When deleting a folder, the top folder in the folder tree becomes
highlited. Wouldn't it be more logical for The Bat! to highlight the parent
folder of the deleted one instead (that's what I liked in OE)? It's a
bit borrowing when you delete a sub-folder of a folder at the very
_bottom_ of the folder tree, and - ooops! - you are at the very _top_
of it...
4) Sometimes, people send us messages in the UTF-8 encoding. Is it
planned to implemented UTF in The Bat! ? At the moment, I have to keep
those messages in Outlook Express...
5) I had some old mail in a _broken_ OE folder. I used DBXtract by
Stephen L. Cochran (a great program, BTW) to extract all those
messages to .EML (=.MSG) files, and then imported them into The Bat!
through the command line. Well, some messages (quite a lot of them, in
fact) , with broken RFC822 headers, appear as empty. However, if I export
them into a Unix-style mailbox from within The Bat!, and then import
that Unix-style mailbox back into The Bat!, messages appear moreless
OK (with bodies which make sense, etc). Can any kind (and
knoledgeable) soul out there explain this sort of behaviour?
6) I used Ctrl+Alt+Shift+L (search for folders), which I found in my
old TBUDL archives as an undocumented feature, and it seems to be still
undocumented! Any developments in terms of putting all such things
together in a document?
Anyway, The Bat! seems to be a very promising program. However, whether I'll
pay for it and continue using it, will depend on its stability and
speed. At the moment, I see it as more _promising_ than _currently
worth its price_. Still, I don't like that approach of everything
being very proprietary in OE very much, and hope I'll not have to come
back to using OE.
Best regards,
Maksym
--
Maksym Kozub, Director
Kozub & Lee Translations
3 Bastionna St., Suite 75
Kyiv, Ukraine
Tel/fax: (+380 44) 296-1181
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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