> >Anybody using Linspire (Linux) 4.5? > >Jones Haven't had the chance, but I switched everybody at work over to Konqueror and Kmail, the programs that come (or should I say Kome?) with the KDE package. My co-workers are quite happy with them. In the more recent incarnations of KDE, they cobbled a bunch of separate programs together with a common user interface for the e-mail program, Kmail, so that it more closely resembles Outlook. It has a calendar, day planner, group messaging capabilities, and some other junk. The result was mammouth program that was ugly, loaded much more slowly, and nobody was using any of the other features (just like Outlook!). I dug around a bit, and found a way to load just the Kmail program itself, and everybody was happy again.
As for security, Kmail has the ability let you read your e-mail while it is still on the ISP server. You can delete anything that looks suspicious on your ISP server before it is brought over to your machine. I have found that European ISPs are much more proactive in protecting their customer base from viruses, trojans, spam, etc., than their American counterparts, but occasionally I do get a spam e-mail or a virus in my e-mail. It is a very rare occurrence when a bad e-mail makes it through the ISP's filters here, but having the ability to delete it on the ISP server prevents any unpleasant surprises. I am not sure if Outlook allows you to do this, since I have not used the M$oft e-mail clients for well over a decade. I know that it did not use to allow it, and it would automatically open and execute everything that landed in your mailbox. That was what prompted me to look around for alternatives in the first place. If M$oft did improve their e-mail client, I'm sure that took an Act of Congress to get them to do so. I have read that the Mozilla e-mail client is also pretty decent, and one of the guys here at work uses it in Linux. He swears by it. Again, my experience with Linux is so limited that if I do get something to function here the way I would like it to, the champagne corks fly, and I do not have the luxury, timewise, to be comparing a lot of different programs. I have also read some good things about the email client Evolution. It is recommended by Linus, himself. I have it on my machine, and I have popped it up to take a look at it, but I haven't used it on a daily basis. What I recommend for an e-mail client for Windoze is Popcorn from Ultrafunk. It is incredibly free, small, fast, and allows you to read everything in plain text on your ISP server before you take it on to your machine. It only reads plain text, so you are fairly safe. You need another client if you want to look at foto attachments or HTML rendered e-mail. I particularly like it because I can easily fit it on to my USB stick, and check my mail on any Windoze machine I happen to find myself sitting on at the moment, anywhere in the world. After reading my mail, I just let it sit on the ISP server until I get home. I should look around for something similar for Linux, as I find myself sitting on more and more Linux machines as time goes by. Perhaps Horace has a suggestion. Knuke
