AOL Communicator == Minotaur
Well, maybe not exactly. But it is in spirit.
So, to follow up on Pinder's post from yesterday, I downloaded the beta and installed it. Lo and behold! It's Mozilla mail!
Basically, this is the mail/news branch of Mozilla (around version 1.2 + spam filtering it seems).
Ok, so for the part people should be intested in:
- Speed! Damn this is fast. I often wait for many seconds for the Mozilla Mail window to restore and display, AOL Communicator is quick as Phoenix in that regard.
- You CANNOT import settings from Mozilla Mail / Netscape / etc
- No newsgroup support
- I cannot seem to subscribe to IMAP folders, but that's probably not implemented yet
- There is no quick launch icon (I think this is bad, but I'm sure I am a minority on this)
- The UI is pretty clean, in some aspects, they go back to the way Netscape 4.x worked (mail header column organization) and in other ways the interface is a lot cleaner from the Mozilla branch
- A spell checker is included! Thank you closed-source!
- There is no preferences UI beyond the account settings. So I cannot, for example, turn on "Compose only in text" for new message. Of course, I could just find where the prefs.js file is...
- Spam filtering is built right in and seems a little further along than the Mozilla builds
Over all, it's ALMOST a usable alterternative until Minotaur / Thunderbird come out, if the subscribe and import features were there, I would definitely use it.
Comments
Only problem w/ AOL products is everytime you install them they put the stupid aol icons on your desktop, start menu, bookmarks ect.
So, to follow up on Pinder's post from yesterday, I downloaded the beta and installed it. Lo and behold! It's Mozilla mail!
No, it isn't. It might look a little like Mozilla Mail & Newsgroups but it's not based on it. If you mess around in the Application Data folder, you'll see that it stores its messages differently. And the file copyright-notice.txt states that it uses the University of Washington IMAP toolkit, which Mozilla Mail doesn't (I don't think it does, anyway). The only part that is Mozilla-based is the message display (Gecko).
The UI is pretty clean, in some aspects, they go back to the way Netscape 4.x worked (mail header column organization)
I always hated that. I much prefer the Mozilla column picker to the 4.x you-can-choose-to-display-the-first-x-columns.
I'm sending heads-up alerts to Phoenix fans and people who use an @aol.com inbox to try this. I like it a lot.
But can someone explain if this is somehow related to the "IM Ascendant" AOL 9.0 Peek reported by InstantMessagingPlanet. The first smartass geek I mentioned that to dismissed AOL9 as "just C## and .NET so it'll work on Windows." That doesn't seem to gibe with the report there that Apple's iChat system is incorporated.
It is nice to have POP and AOL accounts in one program. I work for AOL Time Warner and it sucked having to keep AOL 8.0 open all the time to send off a quick email (our company email was moved from Exchange to AOL when the merger went through) - it is a total resource hog. This program is sleek, fast and completely integrated with AOL mail. I only have two gripes - It needs to have some kind f sound that plays when a new email comes in, and it would be nice to be able to choose a default font. Other than that, the beta is stable (some crashes on my work Win98, though that is probably the OS)
Latest Screen Shots:
http://www.shaggyville.com/aolcommunicator/
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