Netscape Messenger still leaves a lot to be desired

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): A reader asked me a couple of months ago what he could do in order to verify if his message was received by the addressee. He was sending out e-mail messages to dozens of people every day, and he wanted to make sure that all these messages got to their destination. I didn't have an answer.

As I wrote in this column last year, you can actually send your e-mail messages through Document Exchange, a special service offered by UPS. You'll get an acknowledgement that the electronic document you sent was received and perhaps read by the intended recipient. It will even tell you the time it was received. It also involves encryption, so that the confidentiality of the electronic document is more or less guaranteed. But you have to pay for this service. Incidentally, UPS is offering a 14-day free trial that you can take advantage of on www.ups.com.

Then I came across Netscape Communicator 4.61, which also offers a way to let you know that your message was received.

Return Receipt

With Netscape Communicator 4.61, the e-mail client program, which you use to read, store, forward, reply to and send out e-mail messages on, is called Netscape Messenger.

In the upper left corner in the accompanying screen shot, I created a test message to my own address. In Netscape Messenger, this is done with the composition window, which comes up after you click on the new message button in Messenger. I typed some nonsense in the message box and clicked on the options button on top of the window. I clicked on return receipt to enable the feature. If I choose to, I can also have the message encrypted or my signature added.

After I sent out the message and it bounced back from the CBN mail server, Messenger displayed a header with subject, date, from and to, but not the content. A yes/no box, which you can see on the bottom left corner in the accompanying picture, asked me whether I would like to send a return receipt acknowledging message receipt or not. Only after I click on either yes or no did I see the content.

A flaw that I immediately noticed was that Messenger still displayed the message content even after I clicked no. This means the recipient can deny receiving your message even though he has actually read it. Another limitation, as explained in the receipt message, was the return receipt only tells us that our message was displayed on the recipient's screen. Whether he has or has not actually read it is a different matter.

The usefulness of this feature is reduced even further by the fact that it works only if the recipient also uses Netscape Messenger as its e-mail client program. When I used Outlook Express 5.0 to retrieve an e-mail sent with a return receipt request activated, nothing happened and the content was displayed as usual.

Other limitations

As we rely more and more on e-mail for our work and even social life, message filters, or rules that help us manage our e-mail, become very important. The more sophisticated the filters can be, the more we can do; for example, blocking out unwanted messages, storing incoming messages in their appropriate folders and forwarding them to different e-mail addresses. Unfortunately, the filters facility in Messenger pales in comparison with what Outlook Express 5.0 has. The actions it can perform on messages that fit your criteria are limited to move to folder, change priority, delete, mark read, watch thread and ignore thread. Unlike Outlook Express for example, we cannot tell Messenger to automatically forward certain messages to another address, reply with a prepared message or simply trash messages.

Customizing the Messenger display is also difficult and restricted. There are only two different layouts available in the preference dialog box, and the change from one to the other only takes effect after we close the program and reopen it. In Outlook Express, clicking on the apply button below will instantly change how the program window looks like.

Furthermore, we cannot select which columns we want to have in the message list panel. If we have inadvertently attached the wrong file to the message, we have to use the backspace or delete key. In Outlook Express, we don't even have to let go of the mouse. We can use the mouse's right button to call up the menu and click remove.

One feature which I like but is not available in Outlook Express is the forward as new function. I can forward a message as if it is a newly created one. On the other hand, there were features I didn't see necessary. Among them were the options of using fixed width or variable width text. I thought we could easily live without this option. Needless to say, Netscape does have a lot of catching up to do.

What lies ahead for the future? I believe it will be the same as what happened in the word processing area. Developers of e- mail client programs will learn and adopt practical features from each other and give us more and more sophisticated tools which are easier to use. There may be lawsuits, too. As you may have also noticed, the three leading word processors now share so much in common that you can work on any one without a significant problem, and nobody has claimed the patent for the spell check while you type function.

Eudora Pro, another popular e-mail program, now offers text to speech capability. It can read out your e-mail. And in fact, I've been trying out a shareware program called Talking E-mail from 4Developers. This e-mail program downloads messages and reads them aloud through speakers with acceptable naturalness. You can download the trial version from www.4developers.com. It's just a matter of time until somebody, even Microsoft, adds this capability to Outlook Express or other similar programs.