Feeding The Spiders

I have been a hardcore mac user for a long time but I have to say the mail client offerings are lame, at best. This year, we added a PC to my workstation area so I could become even more familiar with the various desktop environments (Kubuntu, Vista, WinXP) and so I could have a mail client that would interface with our new Exchange server. I installed Outlook 2003 and had been pretty pleased with going a step up, but there were some features still missing. Features that would take Outlook from a good mail client to being a great mail client.

Specifically I was looking for an e-mail scheduler. I like to email myself and others reminders and had been using a web based service to do this, but sadly it went from being a freebie to a pay service. I decided if I was going to pay for something, I might as well find a robust solution that would meet my needs.

After poking around online a little I found MAPILab’s Toolbox. I had been searching for an email scheduler but I ended up finding SO much more. I read their list of features and found myself thinking “Yeah, that would be a great thing to be able to do,” or “I never thought about doing that, but now that I know I can, I really think I need to be able to.”

There are 18 (!!!) components to this toolkit which overwhelmed me at first. Thankfully, MAPILab has apparently done their homework. You can enable all 18 components or only the ones you need so your toolbars/menus don’t get cluttered unnecessarily. I found the interfaces to be intuitive and extremely functional with advanced settings that other more expensive and less useful plug-ins/add-ons didn’t offer.

MAPILab’s website also has something that I was missing from other offerings: lots of screen shots. I could see right away before I had even installed the program that it was going to be a powerful app that was going to solve all of my mail client woes.