When I first heard last year that Nisus Software was developing a Mac email client, I expected something insanely great. After all, Nisus is responsible for what I consider to be the all-round best full-featured Mac word processor -- the non-conformist but ingenious Nisus Writer.

However, I also wondered what in the world Nisus could find to do differently with an email client other than rearranging the proverbial furniture. After all, there is not exactly a shortage of choice in POP3 email client software for the Macintosh. There are of course the venerable Eudora, the stylish upstart Outlook Express, and Netscape's Messenger module, (all freeware, or in Eudora's case with the options of free, ad-supported, or commercial software versions), to name the big guns.

Then you have the second string of shareware and commercial software Mac email clients, including PowerMail, Mailsmith, Quickmail, Musashi, Green (freeware), and Mulberry. A fair few Mac-heads still use Apple's discontinued Emailer or CyberDog email software.

Except for CyberDog, all of these programs are analogically similar in the way they work and are used. There are of course some substantial differences of emphasis and features, but not really a lot in what they do.

However, Nisus Software, a maverick company not especially noted for following the herd, has not disappointed with their just released this week Nisus Email, which really is something really new under the sun in this category. I have been experimenting with beta versions of Nisus Email for a month or so, and the more I use it the more I like it and appreciate its genius.

Goodbye Application Window

The main innovation of Nisus Email is that it has no user interface in the sense that all of the email clients listed above do. Instead, the program allows you to compose and send email from within a wide variety of applications -- such as your favorite word processor -- with a minimum of interruption in your work pattern. No need to move to another application. Just drag your message to the little "Floating Post Office" icon that appears on your desktop when Nisus Email is open, and away it goes.

Nisus says it had three major objectives in developing Nisus Email:

1) They wanted to provide an easy, unobtrusive, and quick way of sending email messages from within ANY application

2) They wanted the ability to send email messages from within your word processor as if that functionality were built into it

3) They wanted the optional ability to send formatted email messages, but in such a way that recipients who do not have the Nisus Email System (NESY) or the right word processor will still be able to read the unformatted message.

You can use Nisus Email to receive all your emails and manage all your archived emails efficiently and easily, using Nisus Email’s filtering and the Mac OS Finder’s folder system.

Each Nisus Email message is archived as a separate document, saved as a text file. It is automatically named as the subject line of the message, abbreviated if necessary.

Nisus Email is designed to be very flexible, allowing you many different ways of doing things, choosing the mode that which is best suited to your needs. All the features of your word processor are available to you in all your email transactions. For example search and replace capabilities can now be used on all your sent and received emails, which are saved as word processor files.

Sending Mail Is A Bit Different With Nisus Email

There are several ways to send mail with Nisus Email. First there is the basic DragSend option; when you are in any program (which supports Drag & Drop) select the text you wish to send and drag it to the Floating PO and it immediately sent. That’s the "One-Click Send."

You can choose to either send the text immediately or edit it first. When you move the mouse over the top part of a contact icon (contact icons are explained below) you will see an indicator that the text is to be sent directly to the contact, with no delay. If you move the mouse over the bottom of a contact you will similarly see an indicator that you will be prompted to edit the text in the Quick Message Window before it is sent. Your choice.

If you want to email a file (or a folder, or even multiple files) using DragSend, just drag and drop the file(s) onto the Nisus Email icon and click the contact you would like to send the files to. As with DragSending text, you can choose to either send or edit the message before it is sent. If your message is not pre-addressed, you will need one additional click on a contact icon to complete the addressing process.

This is, to put it mildly, fun. Want to send the URL of a cool Website you have found to a friend? Just drag it to the Floating PO and click your contact. Wheeee! It's gone just like that. Ditto with choice blocks of text. This takes email to a new dimension.

There are three other methods of sending email: Send On Save (SOS), the Quick Message, and Send Clipboard.

SOS sends any file saved or moved to the “Dispatch” folder, either as an attachment or as a message or both. To use Quick Message, click on the Nisus Email Floating PO and the Instant Window with all your frequent Contact Icons will appear. A click on your chosen contact icon opens a Quick Message window ready for you to compose or paste in your message. Another click sends the message. The Send Clipboard feature is useful when you are using a browser and want to send someone, or even yourself, a copy of an article or Webpage. Often a browser will not allow a drag-and-drop. In that case a Copy followed by the Send Clipboard command will work equally well.

The Floating PO icon is always accessible because it floats above any other normal window. Nisus Email does not need to be the active application for the Floating PO to be visible and active, ready to receive your messages and files. Wherever you are, in your word processor, another application, or in the Finder, you can drag and drop text, a file or a folder of files onto this Floating PO and it will immediately be sent or queued, depending on the preferences setting.

All this takes a bit of getting used to for sure. It is new and different from any other email client you have ever used. But once you get the hang of it, the whole thing works very slickly. The biggest adjustment is the aforementioned lack of a program interface. Nisus Email lives in the Finder, and allows you to customize how you want it structured on your computer. There is of course a Nisus Email folder, which contains your sent and received mailboxes and any other mailboxes you create for use with the program's filtering capabilities. There is also an attractive blue alias icon that you can leave on the desktop or place in your Launcher or Startup Items folder.

Installing Nisus Email

Installing Nisus Email is a breeze. Just double-click on the Nisus Email icon on the downloaded or dragged-form-a-CD installer. Nisus Email is self-installing. The first time it is run it creates all the necessary files and folders it needs. If it is not in its own folder, it will create a new Nisus Email Folder and move itself into that folder, then create all the necessary folders and files, including a macro file called “Nisus Email Macros Vol1.” It will also create an alias in the Apple Menu folder (so you can start it from the Apple Menu).

On first startup a dialog will appear asking you to enter your serial number. If you have purchased a CD the serial number is on the CD cover. If you have downloaded Nisus Email off the Web, the number will be emailed to you.

You can use Nisus Email without the serial number for 14 days from start, just click the “Later” button.

Configuring your email account information is very similar to the procedure with other email client programs. If you've done it before in Eudora or OE or one of the others, you should have no problems. If you're a newbie at this, the very nice user manual will walk you through it. Setting Preferences is also straightforward, but you may want to read through the pertinent section in the manual.

Speaking of the manual, it's a real Nisus Writer text document, that you can print out (24 pages) if you wish or keep open in the background, unlike online help. Nisus Writer documents can be read by any Mac word processor or text editor.

Making Contacts

To have the ability to address your email with just a single click on an icon, you need to create Contact icons. When you click the Floating PO and the Instant Window opens, you will initially see just one contact icon - the “New Contact” icon. You can choose between two types of icon shapes: “Clouds” or “Mailboxes.” Default is the clouds, which I find quite charming, but the Mailbox icons, which resemble little rural mail boxes like the one at the end of my driveway, are very cool too. You can switch anytime the Instant Window is open by holding the Shift key down and clicking anywhere in the window that is not a contact icon.

You can create new contact icons for each of your email addresses in your previous email client's address book , or, if your old address book contains a large number of addresses, you may want to create icons only for each of your frequent correspondents. Each Contact is represented by an icon. As noted above, when you drag text, a file, or a folder of files, you address the email you are sending by clicking the icon representing the recipient.

Contact Icons also play a role in receiving emails. If the sender is one of the correspondents for whom you have set up an icon, that icon will indicate the presence of new email. If it is email from anyone else, the icon representing "New Contacts" (which is always there) will show the presence of email.

Importing Address Books

You can import email addresses by first copying them from any other application, to the Clipboard, and then using the “Import Contacts from Clipboard” menu command from the File menu. You can You can also create

new contacts by choosing the menu command “New Contact” in the File menu.

If you're moving from an older version of Eudora, you can bring in your address book by using Nisus Email's Eudora Import Special feature that will display all your address book nicknames on a pop-down menu beside a button labelled “Import All,” with which you can import your whole address book or selected addresses. However, the latest version of Eudora changed to a completely different address book format and Nisus Email no longer recognizes it, so you'll have to use the manual method.

Mail Management

Setting up filters to direct mail received from specified email addresses to certain folders is also straightforward, and should present no problem if you've done it in other email applications. If in doubt, the manual has clear instructions.

Receiving and sending mail is simple and much the same as with, say Eudora. To check your email and send all queued messages, just press Command M, or select the appropriate command in the Emails Menu. You can also choose just "Check Mail."

To view the mail in your email mailbox folders, choose one of the following options in the Emails Menu:
Show Sent Emails
Show Read Unfiltered
Show Unread Unfiltered
Show Queued Email
As you add custom mailboxes, they will be added to the "Show" commands.

Once you choose a mailbox, a window will open somewhat resembling Eudora's message list windows, and you can navigate and select in a familiar manner.

If you do not have any filters set up, all your emails are saved in a folder called. ”Received Emails” inside a separate folder for each month. The inner folder name is of the form 2000-06 Emails, The first four digits represent the year and the last two the month. If you do set up one or more filters, the emails that do not end up in the filtered folders will end up in this Received Emails folder, unless you designate a folder as an In Box.

One Nisus Email feature that may be very appealing to some users is that each and every sent or received message is stored as a separate Nisus Writer text document (readable by any word processor or text editor), unlike most other email clients which store messages in one or several omnibus documents. This makes finding and extracting a particular message much easier. It is the diametrical antithesis of the system used by Outlook Express. Because each Nisus Email message is a separate text file, you can use the Mac OS Sherlock indexing features built-into recent Mac OS versions, allowing you to search very quickly for content with Sherlock through all your emails, as well as through all your document files.

Preview Messages Before Downloading

Another cool Nisus Email feature is that it allows you to Preview Your Messages while they are still on the remote POP3 server before downloading them. This is especially useful when you are on slow modem connection or are on the road and have a connection for a limited time. If somebody sends you a humongous big attachment you can choose to leave it where it is for now and just download the messages you want.

After previewing the list of waiting emails, you can choose one of the following options:
• to download it and leave it on the server,
• to leave it on the server without downloading,
• to delete it from the server after downloading,
• to delete it from the server without downloading.

You can read downloaded or archived messages in the EML Window, using Instant Window, or using Your Word Processor.

There are no Redirect or Forward commands in Nisus email because when you see an email you have received in an EML Window, you can just select it and drag the selection to the Floating PO. The Instant window opens and you can then click either the “Send” part or the “Edit part” of the icon in the usual way. In Nisus Email no distinction is made between redirect and forward - in both cases the whole message is sent without change, except for any editing you have done. Send Again works in an analogically similar manner.

Nisus Writer A Good Match

While Nisus Email will work with any text-based application, Nisus of course hopes that it will encourage you to use their Nisus Writer word processor, which is particularly well-suited to use with this application because Nisus Writer stores all files as text files fully formatted.

Nisus Writer's powerful Macro capabilities can automate many tasks. Nisus Email comes with a few macros to get you started, but you can also create your own or edit the ones provided if they do not do exactly what you want. As more macros become available, Nisus will post them on their web site.

Since Nisus offers Nisus Writer 4.1.6 as a freeware download, you can check out the Nisus experience with no cash outlay --ever, if you decide not to upgrade to the current Nisus Writer 5.1.3. Actually, you can download and try Nisus Email for 14 days free as well.

Summary

I encourage you to do so. You really have to test drive this program for yourself to get a feel for what it's really like to use. I keep saying to myself, that's really cool!

I am a heavy email user, handling 50 to 100 email messages per day on several accounts, and I expect I'll continue using Eudora for some tasks that it serves well for. However, Nisus Email will remain on my desktop, and I suspect that it will gradually take over much of my email traffic, as I integrate it into my work habits.

I'm giving Nisus Email a Moore's Views & Reviews Rating of five stars out of five. I haven't uncovered any bugs so far, it works as advertised, and the way it works makes me smile. What more could I ask?

Nisus Email Minimum System Requirements
MacOS 8.0 or greater
PPC 601 or greater
4MB RAM minimum
5MB minimum free disk space

Nisus Email sells for $29.95. That's five cents less than $30 more than Outlook Express or Netscape Communicator, but $20 less than the paid version of Eudora 4.3, and especially if you decide to get the free Nisus Writer 4.1.6 to use with it, it's a lot of software for the money.

For more information or to download, visit:
http://www.nisus.com/Products/NisusEmail/

Charles W. Moore

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Saturday, 22-Nov-2008 03:00:33 EST