New Technology Reviews!.: Client

Best Mac email client: 6 on test

<img src="http://img412.imageshack.us/img412/6135/mac228groupwinner200200.jpg"> Despite the rise of Facebook, Twitter and other social media, email remains something that we all use every day. And although over the past few years, more and more people have been using email via web-based clients such as Hotmail and Gmail, using a rich, desktop-based client still has some key advantages. Using a desktop client gives you a local copy of your emails, which enables you to view them even when you're offline – and although it might amaze some, there are still plenty of occasions when an internet connection simply refuses to connect. In this test, we've looked at six of the best desktop email clients on the Mac. Apple Mail comes with every copy of OS X, and has improved over the years from a bare-bones email client to a more powerful product. Outlook 2011 is the latest email client from Microsoft, replacing Entourage in the newest version of Office. Mozilla Thunderbird is an open source email client from the team responsible for Firefox, and includes plenty of powerful features. PowerMail, GyazMail and Mailsmith complete our line-up. All of the clients have strengths and weaknesses, but we've chosen to focus on ease of use, support for different email protocols, filtering and spam handling. Let's take a look… Test One: Ease of use Setting up an email client can go one of two ways… <img alt="Test 1" src="http://img213.imageshack.us/img213/7647/mac228grouptest142090.jpg" width="420"></IMG> All of the products on test support the POP protocol, and all except Mailsmith support IMAP as well. Mail and Outlook also support Microsoft Exchange servers. Most will have a go at auto-configuring themselves to your account settings, although results can be variable depending on the type of account you use. As expected, Outlook performs well if you're using it with an Exchange account, but given a Gmail account it requires some tweaking. Likewise, GyazMail, PowerMail and Mailsmith require a little fiddling to work with Gmail properly. All of the products are easy to use when it comes to day-to-day tasks. Mail and Outlook integrate with calendar systems (built-in and iCal respectively) to create to-do items based on emails. Thunderbird, which in its previous incarnations was somewhat tricky to set up, has been much-improved. Now the overall interface has been brought up to the kind of standards set by Mail and Outlook. Test Two: Multiple accounts How well does the product handle multiple accounts? <img alt="Test 2" src="http://img823.imageshack.us/img823/1383/mac228grouptest242090.jpg" width="420"></IMG> Many users now have multiple email accounts, which makes handling more than one email address important. All of the applications on test have the ability to handle multiple email accounts. There are two schools of thought about how email clients should handle multiple accounts. The first is that every inbox must be kept separate, so that you don't mix work mail with home mail, for example. The second says that everything should end up in the same inbox, so you can process all your email quickly and easily. Mail, Outlook and Thunderbird give you the option of both methods. With Mail or Outlook, you simply click on the Inbox icon at the top of the list and it places all your inboxes into a unified view. With Thunderbird, you need to click through to its special 'unified view' mode. The other packages keep inboxes separate, although in all cases you can create filters or special views that show you unread mail from all accounts. Test Three: Filtering How well does each package filter incoming email? <img alt="Test 3" src="http://img254.imageshack.us/img254/251/mac228grouptest342090.jpg" width="420"></IMG> All of the clients include the ability to filter messages as they arrive. Often, this will be used to file incoming mail from a mailing list into a folder, to avoid inbox clutter, but filters can do a lot more if given a chance. PowerMail includes some extra filtering options that will please power users, such as the ability to automatically save attachments to a specific folder – handy if you receive files from a client and want to ensure they are always saved in a particular place. Outlook enables you to set To Do actions using a filter. This means, for example, that you can add a rule which creates a To Do item for any email from your boss. Mail – the only other client with support for To Dos – doesn't have an equivalent feature. However, it does have 'smart mailboxes', which let you set up folders with a set of filtering criteria. Instead of moving mail into a folder, though, a smart mailbox just displays matching email, no matter where it's located, which is useful when searching. Test Four: HTML handling Email can come in HTML form, but do our clients like it? <img alt="Test 4" src="http://img818.imageshack.us/img818/3336/mac228grouptest442090.jpg" width="420"></IMG> Despite the complaints of the purists who believe that all email should be standard text, HTML email is a fact of life. Not only do companies send out formatted newsletters using HTML, but some clients even enable users to create HTML emails to send to others. Mailsmith takes the purist's approach, and doesn't display HTML in-line at all. Instead, if you receive an HTML email, it converts it to text but gives you the option to send the HTML to a web browser for display. All of the other applications attempt to display the HTML, with varying degrees of success. PowerMail enables you to turn off HTML email by default, and – like Mail – also offers to automatically download images (although both applications note that this can be a security risk). PowerMail also includes a handy 'Quick Look' feature, so if an email has an attachment, you can see its contents without having to leave the application or open the file. The Winner: Apple Mail <img alt="Apple mail" src="http://img249.imageshack.us/img249/4154/mac228groupwinner42090.jpg" width="420"></IMG> Of the six clients on test, three fell by the wayside fairly quickly. Mailsmith's lack of IMAP support outweighs its plus points. GyazMail, while having a simple interface, has little to recommend it, and PowerMail – despite its excellent filtering – feels like a product in need of a major upgrade. This leaves us with Mail, Outlook and Thunderbird. All three are easy to use and have powerful filtering and account support. However, Thunderbird lacks direct support for Exchange servers, while Outlook is the only one that costs money. That leaves us with one winner: Apple's Mail. It's free, works with virtually every kind of server going, is integrated well into OS X, and has plenty of options for handling accounts, spam, and filters.

Best Mac email client: 6 on test

Despite the rise of Facebook, Twitter and other social media, email remains something that we all use every day. And although over the past...

Sharp spends $1.2 billion on LCD production plant, Apple alleged client

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3qrU7DfAPDsEPmDLYG526gj5IlCuGoQf0ZikKBGs8H6_lJYBpdKb6TN2ywZm2Q_v4hSUR7us1XOc4-AqB-IrP62YsysoukWjeJl2K94rznqLYV5TDOpaqURAk4Gs6F5clN96OTCnOioo/s1600/iphone-retina.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3qrU7DfAPDsEPmDLYG526gj5IlCuGoQf0ZikKBGs8H6_lJYBpdKb6TN2ywZm2Q_v4hSUR7us1XOc4-AqB-IrP62YsysoukWjeJl2K94rznqLYV5TDOpaqURAk4Gs6F5clN96OTCnOioo/s1600/iphone-retina.jpg" /></a></div>Some more scuttlebutt out of the Japan's Nikkei Daily suggests Apple may be investing in a Sharp-owned LCD facility. The Japanese LCD facility was built in 2004 for the production of television LCDs. It has recently been re-purposed for small to mid-size LCDs after Sharp sold off its TV production equipment. Sharp is reportedly expanding this plant to meet increasing demand for mobile-sized LCDs. Construction is expected to begin in 2011 and the plant should be ready for production in 2012. This build-out will cost about 100 billion yen ($1.2 billion) and Apple is allegedly shouldering the lion's share of this cost. This rumor should sound familiar as earlier speculation suggested Apple was investing in a Toshiba-built LCD facility in Japan. According to this earlier report, Apple was investing US$1 billion into the plant, which would be used to produce high-resolution retina displays. Apple failed to comment on this story, but Toshiba vehemently denied Apple had invested in this plant. For the end consumer, it does not matter whose money is involved in building these plants. Additional manufacturing facilities will help ensure LCD production meets or even outstrips demand. If this buzz pans out, LCD shortages may be a thing of the past.

Sharp spends $1.2 billion on LCD production plant, Apple alleged client

Some more scuttlebutt out of the Japan's Nikkei Daily suggests Apple may be investing in a Sharp-owned LCD facility. The Japanese LCD fa...

Sharp investing $1.2b in expanding smartphone LCD production, Apple fingered as the major client

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJv2MtmPSZi7YyRQD-xNhER_D8FlVLGTudCU9vAW76svJ85YWPNhkD2gnUuWQyBzFdRKHOFjYR0ieC8RW_vb78hV3EHRibkejIXzMZNg-0-UOLEeW6Hpnwq7aPlEJqFBGXCo-XechM4NY/s1600/is03-iphone-4-02-sm.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJv2MtmPSZi7YyRQD-xNhER_D8FlVLGTudCU9vAW76svJ85YWPNhkD2gnUuWQyBzFdRKHOFjYR0ieC8RW_vb78hV3EHRibkejIXzMZNg-0-UOLEeW6Hpnwq7aPlEJqFBGXCo-XechM4NY/s320/is03-iphone-4-02-sm.jpg" width="320"></a></div> 
Apple's practicing its self-imposed rule of supplier polygamy this week and Japan's Nikkei is telling us all about it. It started off on Monday, when we learned that Toshiba's throwing down some cash to build a new smartphone display production plant, with Apple as the key investor and subsequent consumer, and today we're hearing pretty much the same story, only with Sharp playing the role of Japanese producer to Apple's hardware whims.

Sharp investing $1.2b in expanding smartphone LCD production, Apple fingered as the major client

Apple's practicing its self-imposed rule of supplier polygamy this week and Japan's Nikkei is telling us all about it. It started o...

Thin Client Technology, Laptops and Identity Theft

The Laptop Theft Epidemic Possibly one of the most terrifying thefts that can happen to you is the theft of your laptop. Whether it's your own personal computer, or a company computer you've taken along on a business trip, your laptop holds unaccountable information that probably you yourself don't even know is there. A lot of information is in the form of passwords and web url's that give a thief access to anything from your bank account numbers to your credit card statements, Federal and State tax forms, and that Holy Grail of all Holy Grails -- your Social Security Number. Data on your computer is, of course, fully accessible to the thief. According to Laptop Theft Resources, 20% of Data Breaches in 2008 were due to laptop theft. Beyond the personal nightmare But beyond the personal nightmare of having your own identity stolen comes information about your clients, either of your personal business or the company you may be working for. Recent horror stories include stolen laptops from insurance companies that keep the personal data of 10's of thousands of clients. These have been stolen from employees who took the computer out of the office to do some work at home. It's estimated that an ordinary notebook contains $972,000 dollars worth of sensitive information and some could store over eight million dollars. Theft of a laptop makes up over 54% of all Identity Theft incidents and since 2005, there have been more than 150 million data breaches resulting in Identity Theft (Absolute Software). Yet, there seems to be an unaccountable apathy toward laptop theft. Starbucks, for example, reported in 2008 a theft that involved 97000 unencrypted records, social security numbers, and passwords but according to Laptop Theft Resources, media response was minimal, and the public seemed uninterested. The Thin Client Solution to Identity Theft By placing the lion's share of information on a remote server and gaining access to it by strongly encrypted passwords, a thin client laptop effectively puts all the information processed by it out of the ID thief's reach. The theft of a laptop would then involve only the hardware involved, and since a thin client's value is only $500 - $600 (or less) this represents a much lower loss than a fully equipped laptop which can run well over $2000. And with modern theft recovery services such as LOJACK, the thin client can be easily recovered. So why isn't there a high demand for thin client laptops? Little Demand for Thin Client Laptops? So far, consideration of thin client technology has been pretty much limited to the Corporation. Consumers seem to have little demand for it. Several reasons might account for this: 1) Consumers want all of their software, data, and storage under their direct control. 2)The infrastructure is not yet fully developed. Google is working on the back end services necessary for thin client solutions. 3)The "airplane solution" has not yet been fully worked out. This solution would enable you to work on your data in places where access to the Internet is not available. 4) Wireless networks need to improve in band width and security. 5) Security of the remote servers and databases would have to be absolute and not hackable. Hacking into remote systems would be far more devastating than the theft of a single laptop. Instead of exposing 96000 people to Identity Theft, conceivably 100 million could be exposed once the system becomes universally accepted. Is There a Future for Thin Client Notebooks? Perhaps, though, the main hindrance to consumer acceptance of thin client laptops is apathy toward Identity Theft. In spite of the daily horror stories appearing in newspapers and on the Internet, we seem to cling to the attitude that "it happened to the other guy but it can't happen to me". Nothing could be farther from the truth, but until we as consumers really face the fact that any one of us can become victims at any time, we won't really be willing to overcome our aversion to complete control, and possession, of all of our data on our personal computers. Data can be made absolutely secure on a remote server; we have the technology for that. With that in mind, it becomes obvious that thin client laptops are the ultimate answer to laptop Identity Theft. But will we all someday be processing our data remotely, when a laptop theft involves the theft of hardware only? Will that day come? It depends... It depends on you and me, and whether we are willing to take the step to the new paradigm of having our data and processing power located on a remote computer, not in our direct possession. We need first to recognize that Identity Theft is a horror that can indeed happen to us, and make whatever changes are necessary to prevent it. Secondly, we need to realize that the data we think is under our control can easily fall into the hands of a thief and will NO LONGER be in our possession. Then we will be ready for "thin client" laptops.

Thin Client Technology, Laptops and Identity Theft

The Laptop Theft Epidemic Possibly one of the most terrifying thefts that can happen to you is the theft of your laptop. Whether it's yo...

How to Set Up ISA and SSL Client Certificate Authentication

How to Set Up ISA and SSL Client Certificate Authentication

Click "Start" > "Run" and enter "MMC." Click "OK." Add the certificates snap-in. Click "Ser...

How to Remove Client Access Server Certificate

How to Remove Client Access Server Certificate

Click "Start," click "Administrative Tools" and launch "Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007." ...