John Morse wrote: > Did anyone see the PC Mag review of "The Bat" yet? > They gave "The Bat!" 2 marks out of a possible 5 > Outlook 2003 received 5 marks.
While I think criticism is healthy, and I'm not one to have "blind loyalty" tendencies, I do think this review was pretty crappy. There are certainly things to criticize about The Bat, but PC Magazine missed them, IMO. My only guess as to the "overly cute" comment would be the splash screen (?) Where else could TB possibly be overly cute? Outlook's Mail Ticker ... err... small window that appears when new messages arrive does have one nice feature: it automatically fades out. That might be a good consideration for a future mail ticker option. Spam and anti-virus is best left to the user. There are so many good programs out there for both, why judge an e-mail client on its *native* support for either? Isn't one of the reasons so many people run from Outlook (or Word or ...) is because it's so bloated with features that it's too damn slow? Outlook can do some good things (rarely is an app all bad - even though it's easy to jump on anything Microsoft). To me, Outlook's best asset is compatibility - most e-mail related software will work with Outlook. This is important for things like Palm-related apps and such. But if a program's best asset is that lots of people use it, that doesn't speak much of it's feature set/usability/reliability/etc. And we all know that due to Outlook's popularity (and Microsoft's address book), it's the mail client most targeted by viruses. It's funny that Eudora is so popular. I would use Outlook over Eudora in a minute. But that's just me. PocoMail is a decent e-mail client, but has more problems than The Bat and isn't as powerful. I'm not sure why so much emphasis was based on spam-blocking, when there was a separate review of spam-blocking tools (some of the e-mail client reviews even reference this other article). It seems that clients lost a lot of "points" based on poor native spam-blocking. It's too bad the reviewer didn't spend some more time discussing The Bat's template and filtering capability (which is the best around, IMO). Without getting too much into the validity and/or seriousness of PC Magazine, how thorough could a review be in 253 words? I think PCMag is sort of the McDonalds's of tech magazines, so just being part of the review is testament to The Bat's growing popularity. (Becky and Mulberry certainly weren't mentioned). -- Ken Green Using The Bat! v1.62r on Windows 2000 5.0 Build 2195 Service Pack 4 ________________________________________________ Current version is 2.02.3 CE | "Using TBUDL" information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
