Hi All.
This was given to me by Jim Hill, he created it some time back
when testing out the bat with another mailserver.
I see quite a few of these as cosmetic, but some of them do cause
problems.
-----beginning of review-----
Starting with the simple things:
The installation program is truly awful, complete with cryptic
error dialogs (Error 03!) which don't seem to have any lasting
effect if you press on through them.
It's my practice to change the name of distribution exe files
when testing (because I retain them in the same folder as the
installation) to avoid any clashes with files extracted during
setup but thebat complains that the distribution is corrupt if
its filename is changed.
The sig sep in the reply template is broken (missing trailing
space) but the one in the new message template is ok.
The default quoting scheme is ...
JH> This is what Jim Hill said.
.... which is non standard and breaks the colour quoting of most
clients, including Agent.
If you send a message with attachments to tb it creates a new tab
for each attachment, the first tab being the message body. No
problem there and it's quite a good idea except that the default
action when such a message is selected is to display the contents
of the last tab, ie the attachment, instead of the first tab.
That makes navigation unnecessarily awkward, imo.
The macros (bit of a misnomer that because they're nothing more
than simple placeholders, afaics, eg %FROMNAME inserts the
sender's name into a message) are missing any mention of the
Message-ID field which is a strange omission.
Thebat's text handling, aside from some crazy defaults (are these
guys Russian or Polish or something?), is pretty good, wrapping
properly during editing and allowing long quoted lines to remain
undisturbed. It's unusual to find those attributes in a mail
client these days and it makes thebat very usable. The ui is also
well presented. I had no difficulty finding my way around
initially and it's very easy to change most of the defaults. The
keyboard accelerators aren't quite as comprehensive as those in
Agent and aren't as intuitive, eg Ctrl+Shift+K to display headers
instead of H in Agent and Ctrl+F5 to reply instead of R in Agent,
but at least most screen elements can be navigated without a
mouse which is useful.
The message ticker is a neat idea, creating the impression of a
cut-out window on the desktop, but it's really nothing more than
a cutesy idea with little functionality.
What did surprise me, given the topic of this thread, is how
poorly html messages are presented in thebat's internal viewer.
It may be marginally more convenient to display attachments
formatted inline but their presentation in tools designed for the
job, ie ie5 or nn4.7, is infinitely superior. On the plus side,
the text only view, accessed via Ctrl+tab, makes a very good job
of displaying the html without tags.
More serious matters:
Thebat always creates a Return-Path header which is a
fundamental
misunderstanding of rfc 1123. The Return-Path header should only
be added when *removing* a message from smtp, not when
*inserting* a message into smtp.
Thebat seems to add a number of gratuitous blank lines onto the
end of its messages. This is difficult to check properly because
the editor doesn't constrain the cursor to the text by default,
making it difficult to detect unwanted whitespace.
Thebat uses the dotted quad of its host (when in lan mode) in its
helo argument ...
| EHLO 192.168.55.2
.... instead of the configured host name required by rfc 1123. The
hosts file on the test machine contains ...
127.0.0.1 laptop.jhc.org.uk localhost
192.168.55.2 laptop.jhc.org.uk
.... so it could easily have resolved the ip address into a domain
name if it had tried.
| From: Jim Hill <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
| Reply-To: Jim Hill <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Thebat adds a gratuitous Reply-To header by default. This should
never be done if both From and Reply-To contain the same address.
| X-Priority: 3 (Normal)
There may be a way of getting rid of unwanted headers like this
but I couldn't find it during my brief tests.
| Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Thebat uses the domain of the server to which it attaches to
create the rhs of its msg-id. This is considered bad practice
because it increases the risk of msg-id clashes (but less of an
issue in mail than in news to be fair).
| In-reply-To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
| References: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Nice to see proper threading info being included in replies. I
didn't test thebat's threading capabilities but it claims to
thread via References which is useful. Note the capitalisation of
In-Reply-To - untidy but not serious.
| Mime-Version: 1.0
| MIME-Version: 1.0
The usual advice is to capitalise the first part of that header
(as shown on the second line above) because some mime
implementations (incorrectly) fail to register it otherwise.
Probably of increasingly less importance as time goes by.
Mail sending is poorly implemented, imo. Thebat throws up a
"sending" dialog on screen as it starts to send a message to
smart host and keeps it there until it receives a 250 response to
its quit command (or until the receiving application yanks the
socket). That could lead to signifcant delays for the user who
must wait for the dialog to clear. Most mail clients issue quit
and just disconnect these days.
I was quite surprised that a native 32 bit app needed to display
this type of singled thread behaviour - the user is effectively
locked out from their mail client until all waiting messages have
been sent out one by one using a single pipe. That's a very
unecessary restriction these days.
Thebat's handling of server rejections is somewhat suspect as
well, though it might be my installation. I used reverse telnet
to issue a 450 mailbox busy rejection ...
| !Connected
| 220 ok
| EHLO 192.168.55.2
| 250 ok
| MAIL FROM:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
| 250 ok
| RCPT TO:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
| 450 Busy, try later
| QUIT
| !Disconnected
.... but thebat failed to show that response to the sender. In
fact it subsequently crashed the program and all the account
details vanished with only a single blank pane showing. I had to
uninstall and reinstall to get the default folders (inbox,
outbox, etc) back into view.
Thebat has the same problem as Agent in retaining state
separately for each recipient. If a message is sent to two
recipients and one recipient is rejected by the receiving server,
thebat fails to transmit a copy of the message for the accepted
recipient.
I didn't try the multiple account options but they look very
straightforward to implement and manage. One interesting twist
which I hadn't considered before, is that the application needs
to be instructed which user account to use when constructing its
mailto url.
In the final analysis, I used The Bat! version 1.42d throughout,
I don't think it cuts the mustard as a specialised mail app. It
doesn't have an smtp server for receiving mail as an alternative
to pop3 and its smtp client is poorly implemented with no options
to send via mx lookup instead of direct to smart host. Thebat has
smtp auth and pop before smtp but not etrn, of course. I didn't
try thebat's imap client but a brief search of comp.mail.imap
shows no current users or enquiries about thebat so it's either
perfectly implemented or is unused by most.
In my view, nothing in thebat is sufficiently superior to Agent
to warrant changing clients but, if Agent were unavaible for any
reason, thebat's excellent text handling and multiple account
options make it a viable alternative. That in itself is a
considerable achievement by thebat.
Please note, however, that I haven't stress tested thebat in any
way, eg putting thousands of messages into a folder to check how
well and how quickly threading works. Given the other
imperfections in thebat I'd recommend doing that if anyone is
viewing the program with more than a passing interest.
---end---
--
Sincerely,
Andrew.
Get Public PGP key from: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
PGP key ID: 0x16282F3D (RSA Key prefered)
--
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