Some People Don't Use An Email Client by Nathan Sivin  

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Quite a lot of people don't want to put up with the bloat and extra complexity of a separate web browser and email client, so they use a browser with an integrated email function. Netscape pioneered this arrangement. Its built-in email client is about as sophisticated as any dedicated one, and it is an enormous advantage to move from email composition (Communicator) to web site access (Navigator) to web page authoring (Composer) within a single program. The whole shebang takes up about the same space as Internet Explorer alone. And, as is well known, it has fewer security gaps.

Even better, in my experience, is Mozilla, whose engine Netscape uses (but not the latest version). Mozilla is a open source program, so it fully supports the HTML and other standards, which neither IE nor Netscape does. It has a lot of cutting-edge features. The current version, Mozilla 1.3.1, includes a junk function that recognizes spam (it learns quickly as you tell it which messages are junk) and moves it anywhere you want. It supplements this feature with excellent spam filters that you can set individually. It also remembers email addresses from those you send and receive. As you compose messages, it can delete words forward *and backward,* which seems like a small thing but actually saves a lot of effort. Its browser is equally rich. Not only does it avoid the rampant commercialism of IE and Netscape, but if you don't want to see the ads in a web site, you just click on it and tell Mozilla to block all pages from that server. It has an excellent built-in password manager. And the program is free from www.mozilla.org .

Nor is Mozilla the only superior integrated web application. A lot of people who are fed up with the flabbiness of IE and Netscape use Norway's Opera, which is not free but which is very light and fast. Its built-in email client started out rudimentary, but is gradually getting more sophisticated.

With any email client, messages can pile up very quickly, and searching them--or, for that matter, managing them--is cumbrous and slow. About once a month I move my email messages into askSam and delete them from Mozilla. The email database that comes with askSam takes care of importing them. It does not always divide up the file correctly into documents, particularly those that incorporate MIME encoding, which often takes up much more space than the text of the message.

I find it worth while to, first, move the contents of all my message folders (which are actually files) into one (easy to do with drag and drop in Mozilla). I then open the file in Word, although any word processor that can handle plain text format will do. Since all messages in Mozilla begin with the string "From - " (including space-hyphen-space). I use search and replace to insert a unique string such as "####" in the line before that, and save the file with the extension TXT.

I can then open askSam and import the file, telling it that #### is the divider between documents.  After about six months of this, I have about 49MB in a single EMAIL.ASK file. askSam always opens it without delay and finds what I am looking for instantly. If I need a quotation from an old message, it is the easiest thing in the world to cut it from the AS document and paste it into the Mozilla message I am composing.

SurfSaver does not yet support Mozilla, but that does not notably interfere with my archiving newpaper stories and other materials that I will use in research. I simply keep askSam open but minimized as I search the Web. When I come across something I want to save, I cut it to the Windows clipboard, maximize AS, open the folder in which I want to store the source, paste it into a new blank document. Unless I am in a great hurry, I format it the way I want it on the spot so that it is ready for use. I then save the file containing the new page, and return to the search for new materials in Mozilla.

In the long run, as the number of users continues to increase, IE and Netscape will be forced to abide by the HTML standards if they want to compete, and software developers will not have to write separate modules to suit each browser. That will be to everyone's benefit.

Nathan Sivin

History and Sociology of Science

University of Pennsylvania

nsivin@sas.upenn.edu

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