Hawk Wings » AOL

The Death of Hotmail for Mail.app users and a new solution

Tim Gaden — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 13:23:21 +0000

UPDATE: Not quite as bad as it sounds — See later post.

In April Microsoft announced that it would be terminating WebDAV access to its Hotmail accounts at the end of June this year and replacing it with a proprietary service of Microsoft’s own creation (DeltaSync).

This is bad news for Mail.app users with Hotmail accounts, who have been using utilities like HTTPMail and MacFreePOPs to access their email. After 30 June, they won’t work. (There are reports that 10.5.3 has broken HTTPMail for some users, merely hastening the inevitable).

For those unwilling to let go their Hotmail email address, another solution beckons. While the plugins might not work any more, a web-based service is offering the same function.

IzyMail , so it claims, “enables you to access webmail from major providers such as AOL, Yahoo, MSN, Hotmail, Windows Live, Fastmail or Gmail with any eMail application”. It even has a special page on setting up Hotmail on the iPhone.

It provides users with incoming and outcoming servers that can be plugged into Mail.app’s Accounts preferences. IzyMail does the heavy-lifting behind the scenes, and delivers fresh Hotmail into your Inbox via POP.

It offers free accounts (with some limitations) and a paid option (c. USD 18/year):

Or perhaps it’s time to take another look at Gmail. microsoft, hotmail, httpmail, macfreepops, wevdav, webmail, izymail, mail.app, apple mail, gmail, fastmail, yahoo, aol, desperate measuresSimilar Posts:

MacFreePOPs 2.0: Webmail plugin gets auto-updates, goes almost universal

Tim Gaden — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 13:40:34 +0000

MacFreePOPs is one of two utilities that allow Mail.app users to access email from web-based services like Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL and more.

MacFreePOPs 2.0, just released, adds two nice new features of the mix.

It now includes an auto-updater, which means that users no longer need to go through the hassle of manually updating the separate plugins for each individual web service. It also checks for updates to the main MacFreePOPs application and the underlying freepopsd engine which powers the plugins:

It is now also “half-universal”. That is to say, parts of the app are now compiled as universal binaries, although the main app is still needs Rosetta to run on Intel Macs. The developer is appealing for donations from happy users to cover the USD 500 cost of new software needed to update the whole app. There is more on this in the app’s readme file.

A new reset/uninstall command is also included.

This update narrows the gap between MacFreePOPs (donation-ware, more complicated) and MailForward (shareware, easier to use).

[Thanks, Gary!]mail.app, apple mail, webmail, hotmail, yahoo, aol, squirrelmail, gmail, plugins, emailSimilar Posts:

AOL releases beta of new Mac interface

Tim Gaden — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 11:31:11 +0000

AOL has released a beta version of its new Mac client, known as “Cheshire”.

I don’t have an AOL account, so can’t really put it through its paces, but AOL makes some strong claims:

Cheshire is designed to make it easy for users to read and write email, surf the web, listen to AOL Radio and dial up to the Internet. Cheshire includes AOL’s Parental Controls and works seamlessly with Apple’s built-in applications like iChat and iPhoto.

The interface is nice and plain, one hopes by design, but perhaps it only reflects the app’s beta status.

The web browser works fine (even without an AOL account to log into):

It’s possible that an existing email client has influenced the look of the app’s email interface. There’s a hint of it in the mailbox view:

The layout of the new mail window makes the influence unmistakable:

It’s a Universal binary and comes bundled with AOL Radio for Macintosh (some kind of iTunes-esque app?) and AOL’s Pictures plugin for iPhoto. It only runs on Tiger.

It you have an AOL account and a taste for adventure, you can download it from AOL’s Greenhouse web site .

Or if you have an AOL account but like the look and feel of Mail.app and Apple’s other iApps, take a look at AOL’s Service Assistant.

[Via TUAW ]aol, email, mail.app, apple mail, web browser, mac clientSimilar Posts:

Spam-busting: Mail.app and Thunderbird compared

Tim Gaden — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 13:07:00 +0000

The poster at The Spam Chronicles is looking at how various programs and services handle (or don’t handle) spam.

First off, he compares Mail and Thunderbird by testing how well they process 109 spam emails released from his Gmail account.

The junk controls on both clients were reset at the start of the test.

He discovered that Mail flagged 42 of them as spam and missed 67 for a 39% success rate. Thunderbird faired better: it flagged all 109 as spam when its junk mail controls were run on the Inbox.

He them tried again with 61 spam emails from his Yahoo account and found that Mail.app “flagged 23 as spam while delivering 17 to the inbox for a 56% success rate” while Thunderbird again flagged them all when its filter was run on the Inbox.

He concludes:

Apple Mail starts with a more conservative approach in order to avoid falsely flagging e-mail as spam. In Apple Mail the spam filter is on my default. Thunderbird starts off with an aggressive filter but the spam filter is off by default and must be enabled.

Of course, this is not a neutral statistical sample sound for all eternity, nor is it fair to judge the clients on untrained filters, but the result is still interesting.

In another post he compares how a wider variety of web-based and Desktop email clients handled a week of spam, covering Yahoo!, .Mac’s webmail, Gmail, AOL, Apple Mail, Thunderbird and more.

There he finds out that on “the first day Apple Mail caught 10 and missed 10 junk mails. After that initial training it improved dramatically catching 6 and missing 1.”

For .Mac, he makes a perceptive observation: “.Mac mail does not have any web based spam filter, at least not visible to the user”. Nonetheless, “typically, only 1/2 the junk email appeared in my mailbox”.mail.app, apple mail, thunderbird, email, spam, junk, gmail, aol, yahoo, dotmac, .MacSimilar Posts:

Joe Kissell’s bag of Mail.app tips

Tim Gaden — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 11:15:00 +0000

Joe Kissell, author of Take Control of Apple Mail in Tiger and senior editor for TidBits , has written up a bagful of Mail.app tips in a piece for MacWorld.

He covers creating smarter searches in Mail using Boolean operators (things like this — jack & (jill | hill) ! water), how to check Gmail and AOL accounts in Apple Mail, getting the most out of aliases in .Mac, and using iCalMail to send reminders from iCal (clever tip!).

He also offers some tips for getting the most out of Address Book using your Bluetooth-enabled mobile / cell phone.

It’s like the whole of Hawk Wings artfully compressed into half a web page. Essential. mail.app, apple mail, tips, ical, address book, searches, gmail, aol, .Mac, dotmacSimilar Posts:

SwiftMail: Gmail, .Mac, Yahoo or AOL from the Dashboard

Tim Gaden — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 11:11:46 +0000

With the SwiftMail Dashboard widget, you can quickly dash off an email using your Gmail, .Mac, Yahoo or AOL email account.

It offers a quick username and password setup or the option of entering detailed server information.

The widget saves the last five subject lines and the recipients in drop-down boxes to the right of the fields:

Call me a pre-Tiger throw-back if you like, but I don’t see the point of these email widgets.

It’s no faster than switching to Mail.app or using Quicksilver to dash off the note.

Perhaps it is faster than switching to Entourage or Thunderbird or the web-based interface of those services.

You can get the freeware widget from the developer’s web site .

UPDATE: Once briefly QuickMail before becoming SwiftMail (briefly), the widget is now called “DashMail” (for the moment).

[Via TUAW ]widget, dashboard, email, gmail, aol, yahoo, dotmac, productivitySimilar Posts:

More on the macOSXHints mail client poll

Tim Gaden — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 22:35:12 +0000

“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king”.

This saying is regrettably well-known to people like me who because they run a tech blog are regularly called upon by fellow workers (or worse, bosses) to fix interrupt conflicts on their PCs or discover why their Outlook 2000 Net Folders are not working properly.

It is also true of the recent macOSXhints poll data. The data is unsound in lots of ways, but in the absence of any other information, it’s the best we’ve got.

Hawk Wings reader Skid Kennedy, who is a retired engineer, kindly sent in an analysis of the two polls:

This makes some of the gains and losses easier to grasp. The big sleeper is GyazMail , a client to which I pay little attention because it doesn’t support IMAP. It saw a staggering 333% increase, rising from 23 users in the first poll to 181 in the second. Statisticians will rightly have their concerns, but this still seems like impressive growth over two years.

The AOL increase seems massively at odds with the anecdotal evidence, as Skid points out, and looks especially odd to me in a poll that I expect to be geek-heavy.

I am personally convinced (again largely by anecdotal evidence) that Thunderbird’s rise is due to the increased penetration of IMAP, Mail.app’s continued IMAP quirks and the similarity of interface that Thunderbird enjoys across platforms.thunderbird, mail.app, apple mail, gyazmail, IMAP, AOL, email, mail clientsSimilar Posts:

Mail Forward 3.1.1.b1: Reading your webmail in Mail.app

Tim Gaden — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 21:47:01 +0000

Mail Forward is a “webmail translator” that allows you to use Mail.app to read your AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, MSN, and Yahoo webmail. It can also forward email from standard POP accounts.

It works by accessing your web mail or POP mailbox and forwarding each piece of mail through your SMTP mail server. You can manage up to 20 different accounts this way.

Mail checks can be scheduled and AppleScript support offers further options for tweaking the forwarding.

A new beta released today contains modifications to work with Hotmail service changes. It will also display a warning message if an SMTP server name that is known to be unsuitable for forwarding mail is entered in the Preferences dialog.

SMTP servers that send a multiline connection greeting are now supported.

MacFreePOPs does the same thing. It is free but harder to set up.

Mail Forward comes as a demo that will work for 30 days, after which registration will cost USD 19.95. You can get it from the developer’s web site .webmail, AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, MSN, Yahoo, mail.app, apple mail, pluginsSimilar Posts:

AOL censorship twist in Goodmail email battle

Tim Gaden — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 13:27:45 +0000

You don’t have to travel as far as China to find prominent Internet companies engaging in censorship .

AOL has taken to bouncing messages that refer to a petition against its decision to use Goodmail’s email validation service, according to reports in C|News and The Los Angeles Times .

This is the latest twist in a long running saga over AOL’s decision to charge for the assured delivery of email into its customers’ inboxes.

I can scarcely believe the stories are true.

All ethical considerations aside, politically the censorship plays completely into the hands of those who fear, rightly it seems, that the new arrangement will restrict Internet traditions of free speech and communication (among other things).

UPDATE: It seems that the censorship was an unfortunate accident caused by a “software glitch”.AOL, goodmail, email, spam, censorship, free speech, email taxSimilar Posts:

Pay-per-email: More on AOL and Goodmail

Tim Gaden — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 13:08:07 +0000

A month ago, AOL announced that it would hire the firm Goodmail to extract money from organisations and companies in order to ensure the delivery of “certified safe” emails into AOL customer inboxes.

According to the New York Times, the development is “a major change in the economics of the Internet”.

When the shift from its free whitelist to a pay-per-email scheme was announced, some supported it . An op-ed piece in the New York Times by Esther Dyson also argued it was a good idea.

Others were horrified, calling it a naked grab for cash or an attack on free speech .

Bennett Haseldon has now produced a good piece on the development, which has been posted on Slashdot.

He argues that “the market” will not serve to correct imbalances in the new system and, more importantly, that the Goodmail system does not respect the fundamental your right to receive email from whomever you want, not only from people who have paid Goodmail (or anyone else) a fee. Interesting reading.goodmail, AOL, email, email stamps, whitelist, guaranteed deliverySimilar Posts: