‘Net Picks and Pans

Welcome to ‘Net Picks and Pans. From time to time, we’ll use this space to point out products that can help you make the most of the Internet and intranets as well as help you steer clear of the ones to avoid.

In this first installment, we look at three Internet applications we couldn’t do without: messaging, Usenet newsreaders and Web browsers for 32-bit Windows platforms.

Our conclusion? We haven’t found the perfect e-mail client yet, but you won’t find a better newsreader than FortŽ, Inc.’s Agent or a better browser than the latest version of Netscape Communications Corp.’s Navigator.

It’s tough to imagine lasting a day without e-mail. That’s why it’s so important to have a top-notch e-mail client. Too bad we haven’t found one we can recommend without qualification since our move to Windows 95.

The story was different when we were running Windows 3.1. Back then, CommTouch Software, Inc.’s ProntoMail 2.0 did just about everything we wanted. Its configurable toolbar had buttons for operations we performed most often, en-abling us to adjust message headers so we could see as much or as little as we desired and view select subsets of any folder.

However, ProntoMail 2.0 isn’t a 32-bit application, and it can’t understand Windows 95′s long file names. We figured an upgrade would build on the good things already in the product, but that wasn’t entirely the case.

Some of the “improvements” in the Windows 95-based Pronto97 4.01 make it harder to use. No longer can you click on one button to choose a signature. Instead, it’s one of two operations in a dialog window under Options. While you can still use keystrokes to quickly move a message to a folder, an interface bug forces you to press an arrow key before you can choose a folder name. You can configure the main toolbar, but not the one used when composing a message. Not all the news is bad. The new version adds a great feature: the ability to take on multiple user identities without leaving the program, which comes in handy when you have to check mail in multiple accounts. All in all, Pronto97 comes closest to what we’re looking for in an e-mail client, but it isn’t there yet.

Netscape’s Messenger doesn’t cut it, either. We don’t like its two-panel display – you select folders from a drop-down box – and find its navigation toolbar inadequate and uncustomizable.

Qualcomm, Inc.’s Eudora Pro also falls short. On the plus side, it lets you have multiple personalities like Pronto97′s multiple users, and it’s got the most elaborate rules capabilities we’ve seen. But all of that is overshadowed by its interface, which we hate. It forces you to double-click a message to read it because there’s no three-panel display or preview panel; it doesn’t let you delete messages with the delete key while they’re open for reading; and the menu organization is not intuitive.

We find Microsoft Corp.’s Outlook lacking, as well. Its interface is a confusing mess because the product tries to do many things in addition to messaging, but does none of them well.

Right now, we wouldn’t give unhesitating approval to any of these packages for organizations planning a complete upgrade. However, we’ll keep looking and revisit e-mail clients in a future ‘Net Picks and Pans.

Slogging through reams of newsgroup postings for anything of relevance can be tedious and frustrating. While you won’t go too far wrong with any of the free newsreaders out there, you’ll get capabilities that are well worth the few bucks you’ll spend on a commercial package.

Our favorite pick is Forte’s Agent, with Anawave Software, Inc.’s Gravity coming in a close second. Agent has a much better interface, which outweighs the powerful features Gravity offers, including slightly better built-in rules, a facility for viewing postings that contain binary files or images and the ability to search a newsgroup.

Both packages include kill and watch filters. Kill filters skip messages that have components matching specified criteria, such as messages from known spammers. Watch filters highlight postings that meet your criteria.

Together, the filters help you weed out messages cross-posted to multiple newsgroups. Both packages also offer integrated e-mail, the ability to decode binary files and offline reading. Even though neither lets you pick newsgroups from a hierarchical list, Gravity will display only those groups that contain a specific string in their names. However, you still have to pick the ones you want to view from that list.

With Agent, you can apply kill filters to multiple newsgroups at once and purge cross-postings from your message list. With Gravity, you have to do this one group at a time, and you can’t purge killed messages. If you don’t want to see certain messages, you have to create a rule to discard them universally as they are retrieved; you can’t do it manually thereafter.

Gravity’s Image Gallery displays a list of decoded binary attachments and enables you to pick the ones you want to view using an image viewer application.

Agent enables you to decode and view binary attachments with a single Launch Binary Attachment menu choice. Essentially, Agent places decoded images in a single directory and invokes a viewer application, but it has no functionality to manage them.

Gravity also offers a search utility, which Agent lacks, but it can search only one newsgroup at a time for postings with a specified string.

Agent includes a configurable toolbar, which Gravity lacks, and a menu system that’s richer and more logically laid out. You also can set properties for individual newsgroups or for all newsgroups with Agent.

For low-rent newsreaders, a good choice is FortŽ’s Free Agent, which has most of the features of Agent. What you don’t get are a spell checker; customizable toolbar; the ability to receive e-mail; kill, watch and cross-post filters; and the ability to decode base-64 Multi-purpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) attachments.

Netscape’s Collabra is adequate if you’re getting it free with Communicator. But you’ll be a lot more satisfied if you download Free Agent.

There’s no need to beat around the bush: The Navigator component of Netscape’s Communicator suite is the best browser you can get today. As we pointed out in our review of Communicator last month (NW, June 16, page 8), Navigator’s drag-and-drop bookmark interface, customizable toolbars and profiles, support for a broad range of standards and tight integration with other Internet tools puts it at the top of the browser heap.

What about Microsoft’s Internet Explorer? It’s true there are certain features in Explorer that Netscape doesn’t support, such as VBScript. But savvy Web page designers won’t use tools that require a specific browser to view their pages properly, so we don’t see that as much of a plus. However, if you’ve standardized on Microsoft products, Explorer is the way to go because of its synergy with such offerings as FrontPage and Internet Information Server.

Since Explorer currently is a release behind Navigator, we may have to change our opinion when Version 4.0 comes out. The new version’s promised integration with Windows 98 may be a compelling argument for users of that platform.

There are dozens of other browsers out there, but why bother? There’s little they can do that the two powerhouse market leaders can’t.

E-mail client

Pick: None

Pan: Microsoft’s Outlook suffers from a horrible interface that fails to easily integrate messaging with the other functions it supports.

Other notables: CommTouch Software’s Pronto97 (www.commtouch.com) sports a well-designed three-panel interface, multiple user profiles and handy rules, but a couple of rough edges in the user interface need reworking.

If you access the Internet via Windows 95′s Dial-up Networking communications utility, do yourself a favor and download Vector Development’s free Dial-up Network Connection Enhancement (DUNCE) at www.vecdev.com.

Working as an invisible add-on to any Dial-up Networking icon, DUNCE is a big annoyance-saver. It connects to your host without forcing you to click the Connect button in the Dial-up Networking connection box. It transparently connects if you invoke an application that needs a connection established. It minimizes the Dial-Up Networking status box upon connection and transparently reconnects if you lose contact. Furthermore, at connection time, it transparently opens any applications you specify, which means you can check e-mail and view your home page just by double-clicking on the Dial-Up Networking icon.

If you need to store more than one Dial-up Networking profile or start more than four programs upon connection, you can upgrade to DUNCE Gold, which is now in beta and costs $20.

Still searching for a perfect match

The Internet is a great resource, but only if you can find the information you need. Search engines help, but your results may vary depending on which ones you use. Your best shot at finding what you’re looking for is a metasearch engine, software that can scour multiple Internet search sites at once.

After looking at two new metasearch engines and an upgraded version of one first reviewed in March (NW, March 31, page 61), we found they all suffer from awkward user interfaces and won’t provide explicit relevancy rankings. On the plus side, though, each works inside proxy servers.

Iconovex Corp. surprised us with the latest version of its EchoSearch, which rose from last in our previous review to first in this round on the strength of an improved interface and its ability to return more relevant data than the others. Prompt Software, Inc.’s WebSleuth includes good analysis capabilities but has rough edges. FerretSoft LLC’s NetFerret Suite has a basic Web search tool but comes with a handful of other useful Internet search aids. Were we rating additional tools, NetFerret would rank higher.

Upgraded score

While EchoSearch scored higher this time, it still has most of the limitations we saw before. For instance, you can search only six Web engines, and Yahoo and WebCrawler still are not among them. Plus there’s no way to limit the results returned by each engine, as there is with the other products.

But in addition to bringing back the most relevant hits, EchoSearch weeded out duplicates returned from different search engines. Results are displayed in three frames in a Web browser. While the new interface is an improvement, it still has a way to go. For example, if you want to specify a file full of links as a starting place for further searching, you must know the file location because there’s no way to browse your hard drive.

This ability to start a search using a file of previously found links is a huge plus because it lets you zero in on the most useful hits. You can, for example, gather all the hits for “LAN switching” into a file, then use the URLs from the hit list to revisit those sites and search for “latency.”

Another plus is you can schedule EchoSearch for a single run or daily runs at a specified time. EchoSearch also can perform Usenet searches, similar to NetFerret’s NewsFerret component, but it looks only in AltaVista’s Usenet archives.

On the data trail

Prompt Software’s Web-Sleuth stacks up well against EchoSearch, but its cumbersome user interface and limited ability to refine results hold it back. WebSleuth uses three unconnected windows, very much like EchoSearch’s three-frame browser display. The first, a Control Window, lets you specify search strings and add Boolean qualifiers.

You can view retrieved pages in the Preview Window or Web browser. Prompt Software has learned from the mistakes of other search software designers and uses only one instance of the browser to display selected pages. The Preview Window also can generate a textual abstract of a previewed page -handy for a quick scan. The Preview Window is less useful than it could be, however, because there’s no quick way to find your search phrase.

Lastly, the Information Window displays search results on five tabbed pages, the most important of which is the Contents page, where you can view relevant links. The Phrases and Words pages display an overwhelming alphabetic index of every phrase and word in all retrieved documents. To find your object, you have to wade through the list.

While this is useful, we’d really like to be able to refine a search by using all the links in the Contents page as the starting point for a new search. For example, if a search for “stackable hub” retrieved 500 pages, we’d like to be able to enter “cost of ownership” and generate a new, more focused, Contents page. You could then save the new Contents page as an HTML file and share it with others.

You can use a file full of URLs as the starting point for a search, but be careful not to include any extraneous words in the file because WebSleuth will think they are terms you want to search for.

WebSleuth also violates Windows 95 conventions by failing to allow you to paste a URL into the text box of its Control Window.

You can specify the number of references – between 10 and 100 – you want retrieved from each search engine. If you don’t find what you want, you can always go back and widen the search with another batch.

Searching is relatively fast, as you can have up to 15 agents – individual threads pursuing search engines – processing pages at once.

WebSleuth comes configured to access a reasonable number of search engines, including most of our favorites. However, Lycos is not among them, while Dogpile, a Web-based metasearch engine, inexplicably is. You can disable checks against included search engines, but you cannot add new ones.

WebSleuth suffers too from an inflated price tag, listing for $79.95, while the other two are only $29.95 each.

A Ferret family

Metasearch engines are fine for prying information out of Web sites. But if you’re also looking for e-mail addresses, phone numbers or Usenet news messages, FerretSoft has a suite of six search tools designed to find all that plus file and Internet relay chat (IRC) servers.

WebFerret, the freeware component most comparable to WebSleuth and EchoSearch, is distinctly low end. The software comes bundled with support for nine search engines, including all the ones we find useful, but you cannot add any on your own. You can, though, limit the number of hits it returns by search engine or in total.

While WebFerret brings back tons of links, it doesn’t eliminate duplicates. We typically found as many as four references to the same page returned by different search engines. WebFerret also has no way to limit the search to pages that do not contain a given search term.

If you’re going to pay for the suite, you’ll do so because of the other Ferrets it contains. EmailFerret searches multiple Inter-net white pages directories. Although it found two of our former e-mail addresses and two current ones, it could not tell which was which. To be fair, that’s because the directory listings themselves don’t contain that information. Double-clicking on an address brings up your e-mail client with an already addressed message form.

NewsFerret was our favorite Ferret. You specify a string that appears in a subject line and a string that appears in the name of any newsgroup and News-Ferret returns the results. Double-clicking on an article lets you view it. You can specify that you want to save multiple files to disk at once. But you must click a Save button for each one, which is most annoying.

PhoneFerret works the same way with telephone numbers. If Windows Telephony is properly set up, it will dial the number for you. FileFerret searches Shareware.Com, Archie servers and other resources to find files in File Transfer Protocol archives. We’d love to be able to search our own resources, but the program doesn’t let you add searchable entities. IRCFerret is a quick way to find someone by user ID, user information or host name on any of 16 popular IRC networks.

You can even specify keywords that must appear in the channel names a user is on. Clicking on their name takes you to the proper network and channel.

As these and the products in our previous review mature, we expect the vendors will fix the user interface problems and iron out other kinks. We look forward to testing the next generation.