Hello Anthony, Sunday, October 26, 2003, 13:30, you wrote:
AGA> After two days of trying it out, I decided to purchase The Bat! The Bat AGA> will replace Outlook Express as my primary e-mail client. AGA> The reasons why I bought it: AGA> 1. Spam relief AGA> The ability to set filters that look at message headers has _vastly_ AGA> improved my filtering of spam. Almost all the spam I receive has a AGA> Content-type of "multipart/alternative" or "text/html," whereas almost all the AGA> legitimate e-mail I receive has a content-type of plain text, or AGA> something else. By filtering on this one field, I manage to separate AGA> spam from real e-mail with at least 95% accuracy. On Outlook Express, AGA> even with several filters (on keywords, message size, and so on), only AGA> about 20% of spam was correctly identified. AGA> I still read the headers of spam and delete it by hand, but having it AGA> correctly sorted speeds this up considerably, since legit e-mail and AGA> spam are less likely to be mixed together. -------- snip--------- AGA> 2. Too many bugs AGA> The product crashed at least three dozen times while I was trying to AGA> tidy up folders imported from OE. On several occasions, it locked the AGA> current window, and killing the Bat process did not release the AGA> window--I had to log off and log on again. These bugs seemed limited to AGA> that clean-up activity, but if I start getting bugs in everyday use of AGA> the product, it's going to go right out the window. There is no excuse AGA> for _any_ bugs in a commercial product. -------------snip------------- AGA> 3. Sparse documentation AGA> I'm not one to depend a great deal on documentation, but the online help AGA> for The Bat is among the sparsest I've ever seen, and it's a complex AGA> product. I can usually figure out things on my own, but some things AGA> just have to be documented, and from what I've seen, they often are not. AGA> This isn't a blocking issue for me, since there are other ways to find AGA> out how to do things (such as this mailing list), but it slows adoption AGA> of the product. Filtering: Have you considered another filtering method such as the BayestIt! plugin that you can find here: http://klirik.narod.ru/usefuls/bayesiteng.htm I have used it for a couple of weeks and find it very easy to set up and it is amazingly effective. It is a relief not to have to write and re-write filtering rules to keeps up with the bad guys. Bugs: That is highly unusual, and this is generally not even an issue even on the betas. I have used TheBat! for years and it has never crashed on me and I have never lost as much as a single message. Maybe you should set the account properties to compress all folders at exit? Documentation: The help-file is extensive, but it is not always logical where the information is hidden. Have you found the menu navigator button on the title bar to the left of the minimize button? That can help you to find what you are looking for. Another place for help is the forum on RitLabs website. -- Best regards, Mogens ------------------------------------------------------- Using The Bat! v2.01.7 on Windows XP 5.1 Build 2600 Service Pack 1 ------------------------------------------------------- ________________________________________________ Current version is 2.01.3 | "Using TBUDL" information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
