If you ask me, and I know you will, the most useful aspect of the internet is e-mail. You can take the hole world wide web away from me, hide it and forget where like my parents did with brother's BB gun after I shot my cousin in the head with it, and I just wouldn't care in the least. I pretty much only use newsgroups in case of emergency these days (HELP: My Apple Studio Display doesn't work either!), and BBSs...well, I suppose I could always write on a cave wall.

But if it weren't for e-mail, I wouldn't keep in touch with 90% of my friends. E-mails are simple, fast, and free, and I never need to worry about hearing the recipients say, as they often do in phone conversations, "Oh, little Eugene Jr. just said the most adorable thing," or "Hold on, I just got a beep."

You know, I had a beep once. Best weekend of my life.

So when college acquaintances or neighbors move to Nebraska, making themselves otherwise useless to me (and me, useless to them), I can still keep in touch to let them know about Queen Conventions well after our friendship would have otherwise died. Now that I think about it, I owe many of my longtime friendships to Claris Em@iler.

But as much as I hate to face it, Em@iler is growing a little long in the tooth, I think is the expression. It's still fast, still sturdy, and still elegant, but it's not OS X compatible. As I started working my way through the public beta, I came upon a couple realizations; Apple's included Mail program is useless to everyone except those who only pretend to send e-mail, and Outlook Express is still by Microsoft.

The task before me was insurmountable. Not only would I have to find an OS X compatible e-mail program, but it would also have to import my Em@iler databases. Yet before I could even begin my quest, Applelinks was contacted by CTM Development. "Would you like to review our e-mail program," they asked, "that's OS X compatible and imports "Em@iler databases?"

Sometimes the best way to complete a quest is to just sit at home and wait for someone to complete it before you.

CTM's PowerMail is a pane-based e-mail program much like Outlook Express, except that you don't have to wash your hands after using it. It's also faster and more user friendly, but so are oil tankers.

Right from the start, I was quite comfortable using PowerMail. If Em@iler was still being updated, it would be PowerMail. I only needed to study the menus and icons for a few moments before I knew right where everything was. The big problem, however, lay straight ahead. My Em@iler database contained over 1,000 messages and a little less than 100 addresses, and I didn't feel comfortable throwing any of them out...just in case. So I went into PowerMail's Import Database feature and set it to Migrate from Claris Em@iler. After automatically launching Em@iler and sorting through all the junk, it reported that the migration would take a few hours. "Okay, fair enough," I thought. "That's certainly less time than it would take for me to do it manually." However, it actually only took PowerMail a few minutes...to crash. I tried again, and it crashed again, this time without hesitation. I gave up, but tried on my office computer the next day. Same story. So much for migration.

CTM's website does offer alternative methods (albeit for a previous version) for those sharing my troubles, but if I wanted to mess around with all that, I could've switched to any number of e-mail programs. I will say, however, that most people, including my colleague Bill "Catholic Cow" Stiteler, had no trouble with the migration.

Luckily, PowerMail allows you to individually pull in various Em@iler elements, so I was able to transfer my address book without difficulty. My accounts, signatures, and filters, however, had to be recreated manually. But this is not a difficult task, and it showed me that PowerMail's filtering system is probably the best I've used. Unlike Em@iler and Outlook Express, the language is presented in a direct way that clearly states what action will be completed when. Your choices for what to do with filtered messages aren't as robust as those in Outlook Express, but they're easier to set up and target.

Let's backtrack to the account setup for a moment. Again, the language here better reflects that used by ISPs and other e-mail programs these days, so those not familiar with all the POP and SMTP terminology will feel more comfortable. Each account can have specific POP settings, so it's possible, for instance, to leave messages for one account on the server after retrieving it while deleting those from another account. This is handy for people who check both personal and business accounts from varying locations.

The address book is, again, very much like that of Em@iler, but it offers one major bonus; it's possible to configure default compression and encoding methods for each entry. Aside from the convenience of not having to specify these each time I send an attachment, it's also handy for sending an attachment to multiple people on varying platforms.

The one thing I did find disconcerting about the address book, and about all setup windows, in fact, is the lack of a Save button. When you add a filter, address, account, etc., you save the change by closing the window or adding another entry. History has taught me to never close a window without first saving my changes, so working in reverse is a bit unsettling.

Sending and receiving e-mail is pretty much on par with all other programs, give or take a feature or two. I like that PowerMail retrieves messages for multiple accounts simultaneously, but I don't like that I cannot set a file size limit on incoming messages.

The organization of messages once they've arrived (or been sent) is reason enough to switch over to PowerMail. It's possible to select viewing options for individual folders with a few simple clicks, and organizing the columns is a simple matter of dragging them into the selected order. Even better, the search feature takes advantage of Sherlock technology. I need not point out to Mac users the benefit of that. And although PowerMail doesn't have a built in spell checker, it accommodates this by allowing you to select a Word Services application...if you have one...which I apparently do not.

Perhaps the most annoying trait of PowerMail occurs when creating mail. I have five accounts created, all of which have different signature files. These files are automatically placed in the window when creating a new message. My default account is my home address, so the appropriate signature is added. However, if I switch the account from which I want to send the message, the original sig file stays and the new one is added below it. To avoid this problem, I had to shut off the signature on my default account and allow PowerMail to add only the appropriate sig file when I select the proper account. If I use the default account, I have to manually add the signature.

Some smaller complaints include not having the ability to specify, upon connecting, which accounts to which I'd like to receive mail separate of those from which I'd like to send mail. I found myself taking advantage of that feature in Em@iler much more often than one would expect. And hey, what's up with the lack of a keystroke to delete mail? Command-D doesn't work, Delete doesn't work...it seems that the only way to delete an e-mail is to click the trash can. If there is another way, I couldn't find it because...

No manual. There's not even a PDF online that can be downloaded. This has to be my biggest beef with the software industry these days, and every product I review will be punished for not giving users any instruction...and that doesn't include AppleGuide or web-based help. I want a manual, and I want it in print. I don't want to have to go online every time I have a question. You'd think that, with the ability to write and read e-mail in Japanese, Korean, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Arabic, Persian, Cyrillic (Bulgarian, Russian, and Ukrainian), Hindi, Sanskrit, Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi, and Nepali text (using any of three Indian writing systems: Devanagari, Gujarati, and Gurmukhi) in addition to all accented Western languages (English, French, German, Italian, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese and others), at least one of them would get a manual.

Now that I have that off my chest, it's on to the OS X version, which is pretty much the same as the Classic version with the addition of shinier buttons. What works in Classic works in OS X, and what doesn't work in Classic really doesn't work in OS X. Not only did the Migrate from Em@iler option still not work, but I also could not get PowerMail to read even the Em@iler address book. Even more strange, there doesn't seem to be a way to transfer from the Classic version to OS X! I could update from earlier versions of PowerMail (v2.x), but not from the current. Even better, I'd like to be able to have the OS X and Classic OS versions read from the same database. But even without these capabilities, PowerMail is easily the best e-mail client currently available for OS X.

Now, is it the best for the Classic OS? As much as I hate to say it, being a critic and all, that's up to personal taste. I've tried many e-mail programs in my day, and I can honestly say that none of them are horrible, and none of them are perfect. What it all comes down to is how you use the program, how you organize your information, and how much you're willing to pay. If you prefer the "freeness" of Outlook Express over its competition, stick with Outlook Express. If you prefer the set-up of Eudora over Outlook Express, stick with Eudora. But if you want a pane-formatted e-mail program that's small, fairly easy to use, fast, OS X compatible, and can (hopefully) import Claris Em@iler databases, then PowerMail is simply your best bet.

Well, short of drawing on cave walls, that is. I wonder what "Oongutu Hunts Wooly Mammoth" would look like in ASCII art?

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