Netscape Messenger still leaves a lot to be desired

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.