internet

You can open email by selecting 'Email' from the SeaMonkey item in the Microsoft Window's start menu, use the buttons bottom left in the status bar or, lastly, choose from the 'Windows' menu of any SeaMonkey application.

On first opening you need to enter your technical details, so you will need your IMAP or pop username and password and the urls of servers and details of secure logon if needed.  Once entered, the programs start and resembles Outlook Express (and lots of other email programs) and is simple to use.

The picture above will zoom to reveal our Linux IMAP account but running in Windows.  For the record, the interface looks exactly the same and works just as well in Linux.

For reading, composing, forwarding and other normal operations, we had no problem using the application and did not need to refer to the help, although a complete and very good help is available.

Like most modern email programs, SeaMonkey is at pains to shield you from images or similar message content

Like most modern email programs, SeaMonkey is at pains to shield you from images or similar message content that it does already recognise, leaving you to tell it to open them in future.  Although annoying, this is a necessary part of email life these days and once OKed we had no further problem.  All the emails we tested loaded correctly and HTML ones looked good and behaved as they should, making the daily email read as good as with any other application.

When replying, forwarding and composing emails, full advantage can be taken of HTML by choosing appropriate 'headings' and 'text effects', including the standard 'smilies' along with links, anchors, images, horizontal lines and tables.  This all makes for pleasant email composition, if you are a HTML user.

As with most similar programs, you can use the email application for displaying and posting to newsgroups.  Setting this up was easy and operation was as good as with any similar newsreader, messages displayed easily and in the normal way. 

The suite comes with ChatZilla, an IRC chat client which we did not try and with an address book which happily held our addresses and did what it should.

After using Email for a few days it felt like an application that is much more mature and worked so well we soon forgot that it was not our customary Windows email client!  Aside from the look of the application (which we have dealt with earlier) we could find nothing adverse during normal operations.

The next article in this series - it's about Composer - will be posted next week so make a point of checking to see if it is there already or, if not, bookmark us to check later.

Tags: life, seamonkey