One-Stop Box for Far-Flung E-Mail

At last I think I’ve found the solution to one of my biggest annoyances about communicating via the Internet and online services: the lack of a powerful e-mail program that would service all my e-mail accounts, offer a unified address book, allow some basic mail filtering and save on connect-time charges.

For Windows 95 users, Microsoft Exchange was supposed to fill this function, but it proved so clumsy and poorly designed that I quickly gave up trying to use it.

Now, however, version 3.0 of a program called E-Mail Connection fills the bill ably, both for users of Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. E-Mail Connection will send and receive mail from America Online, Prodigy, CompuServe, MCI Mail, the Internet and more. You can even schedule it to round up your e-mail automatically at certain intervals. All your e-mail, no matter what the source, is presented in a single inbox, and is subject to filtering rules you establish, so that e-mail on certain subjects or from certain individuals is shunted off automatically into a dedicated folder.

Thus, E-Mail Connection is of use even if you have only one or two e-mail accounts. Your mail can be waiting for you when you sit down to work in the morning and when you get back from lunch in the afternoon, minimizing online charges. Answering e-mail is a snap using the built-in text editor, which will automatically spell-check your work if you wish.

E-Mail Connection also allows you to set up multiple users, so that family members can all share the same program on the same PC without sacrificing privacy, which is password-protected. As many as 10 individuals can use one copy of the program. File attachments are a breeze; at least under Windows 95, E-Mail Connection lets you simply drag and drop them onto a message.

One of the neater, if somewhat more advanced, features of E-Mail Connection is its ability to let you decide which service to use for any outgoing message. If you have MCI Mail and pay by the message, you might prefer to respond from another account where you have unlimited e-mail. I set things up so that no matter where incoming mail comes from, I respond from my Internet account, so that outgoing messages can be uploaded in one fell swoop.

Even more sophisticated users who worry about privacy will be glad to know that the program has strong encryption built in. Just click a couple of times and E-Mail Connection will generate RSA encryption keys for you and incorporate 128-bit encryption keys received from others. It can even accommodate keypairs from third-party authenticators.

Another nice feature is that E-Mail Connection comes with access numbers to some of the major services already built in. This helps with setup, but it’s especially handy if you use the program on a portable computer and find yourself in a far-off city. You can even set up a second identity for yourself, using the parameters of a city you visit frequently.

If you frequently send the same message to many recipients, E-Mail Connection lets you set up templates that make the process easy. For instance, if you receive a lot of e-mail inquiring about a certain product, you can set up a template containing product information or a press release and immediately whip it off to any interested parties. Templates can even have files permanently attached. And, of course, the address book accommodates mailing lists.

E-Mail Connection isn’t perfect. In order to have it automatically download Internet e-mail, you must configure a separate program, known as a winsock, that is included in the E-Mail Connection package. Novices might find this a bit daunting, although the program works fine as an Internet e-mail program if you establish your Internet connection separately in the routine way.

E-Mail Connection right now has only a limited ability to import address books from other programs, but the company says it plans to release free upgrades later this year allowing importing of CompuServe, Prodigy and address books in other formats. Also, people in the address book are listed under first names, unless you change this for each one, which is annoying when the program is so good at automatically capturing addresses from all incoming mail. But the program does make it quite simple to search the address book for the intended recipient and create a message on the spot.

A more serious shortcoming is that E-Mail Connection can’t handle Internet shell accounts or mail downloaded from a BBS in the widely used .qwk format. For the latter, I recommend CMPQwk, which is shareware available from the Patchbay BBS. Use your modem to dial it at (818) 683-0627.

For more information about E-Mail Connection from ConnectSoft, visit the company’s World Wide Web page at https://www.connectsoft.com/, where you can download a freeware version of the program that only handles Internet mail. For those who want the fuller application, E-Mail Connection should be in stores later this month for about $50. A dedicated Windows 95 version will be out in several months, a company executive says, adding that in all likelihood, users of the current release will be able to obtain it for a small upgrade fee.

A Macintosh version of E-Mail Connection is planned for this year, but meanwhile Claris Emailer does much the same thing in the Macintosh world. For more information, visit https://www.claris.com/, where you can even download a free trial edition.

Daniel Akst welcomes messages at dan.akst@latimes.com. His World Wide Web page is at https://www.well.com/~akst/