I'm in the process of trying to switch email clients after 15+ years
in Eudora. I have no great desire to leave Eudora. But Eudora 7 is
getting too outdated in certain ways (lack of UTF-8 support is the
killer) and I have evaluated all three Eudora
replacements--Penelope-"Eudora 8", Mailforge, and Postbox--and none
of them are getting close. I evaluated quite a few other email
clients, and The Bat! seems the best bet. It's really a powerful
program, more so than anything else I'm seeing. Now I am in the
30-day trial, trying to see if I can actually make it work for me.
(Alas I have no clear back-up plan if it won't work for me.)
I've got all my incoming mail from various accounts filtering into
common folders and sorting according to my preferences. While the
filtering doesn't do everything that Eudora's does, it does a lot
that Eudora's doesn't (and it's the best I've seen moving out of
Eudora)--I'm particularly impressed with the ability to filter based
on address book groups. While it takes adaptation for me (which was
obviously going to be the case), I think I can get most of it
working. Eventually learning how to set some of the keyboard
shortcuts was a big breakthrough.
I end up with a few serious concerns, and I'd like to get some input
into them before I commit to the jump. I've read quite a bit in the
TBUDL archive as well as the forum on ritlabs. Nevertheless, it's
hard to get a sense of the software's history or where it's going,
what I might be able to expect. I'd appreciate some input from users,
as well as pointers to message threads or URLs which might be
helpful. (This is The Bat Pro 4.2.6, with AntiSpam Sniper Pro
current.) All this is in the context that The Bat seems to be very
powerful and the best choice I can see.
(1) My biggest concern is images and HTML email.
(a) I would really like a setting that says Allow All Images in
which the Download URL Manager is never seen and images just get
downloaded (I count on Norton IS to scan POP and SMTP traffic, and as
far as I'm concerned email is no different than clicking on a web
link). If I have to deal with the Download URL Manager for the time
being, if I could remap the shortcut key for the Allow button, that
would help. Do people find that eventually if you Allow All and Allow
All, you rarely get the thing popping up? Is this functionality
likely to get improved pretty soon, or should I assume this is what
I'd have to live with?
(b) Image rendering is pretty faulty. I receive two emails of comics
every morning, each of which render unusable in two different
ways--however, I've found that by setting things just so I can easily
open them into browser tabs where they render correctly--and opening
into browser certainly performs fast. However, I presume all those
other emails I don't look at closely are also rendering badly. Is
image rendering likely to get better? If I were to submit particular
problems such as specific badly rendered emails, might those problems
get addressed bye and bye?
(c) Arrowing through HTML email appears to move cell to cell, rather
than scrolling down as it should and everything else does. Who knew,
but it turns out I use the down arrow key constantly to scroll
through email contents, and this cell to cell thing is not going to
work for me. Is there hope that this will get fixed?
Overall, the question is, can I be hopeful of improvement in this
area in some reasonably timely way? Or should I assume that what I
see is what I get and decide if I can live with it? (As far as the
images/HTML mail problems, the answer would be no, I need to find a
different option if it would be like this long-term.)
(2) My other big concern is around support, maintenance, development.
Can I get support--some forum comments make that seem doubtful. That
the documentation is so out of date and inaccurate and that many
things appear undocumented worries me. (I saw a forum thread about
creating a manual? Is that likely?) I finally found a bug list at
https://www.ritlabs.com/bt/view_all_bug_page.php, referenced in some
forum thread. Is that used? Can I submit there? Is there hope of
things getting fixed?
My other issues are smaller and less worrisome.
I would appreciate input. I'm posting separately to ritlabs forum and
TBUDL--apologies to those who read both and see it twice.
Thanks,
Velma
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Current version is 4.2.6 | 'Using TBUDL' information:
http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
