Internet Archivist

Posted on 2 Jul 2002 at 17:32

Davey Winder enjoys a new way of surfing - in his sleep - and continues his search for the elusive perfect email client.

SurfSaver's 'files and folders' approach results in absolutely no learning curve, so you can start building your own Internet archive without delay. You can edit archives, changing the notes, titles and keywords, and, of course, you can delete pages as your archive grows and some entries become superfluous.

So what's the inevitable downside of this application? Well, the search function could be improved - most of us are used to on-line search engines, so an implementation that used similar functions and features would be welcome. If you're building an expanding archive for professional research purposes then you want, and need, powerful indexing and retrieval options, and SurfSaver could certainly improve in this area, although it's adequate for all but the biggest archives. Then there's that IE 4-only nonsense.

There has been more than a little reluctance among users to move from IE 3 up to IE 4, so a lot of people can't join in the fun, not to mention the millions who are still quite happy with Netscape, Opera or one of the many other browsers available. Finally, they could do something about the amount of window space that SurfSaver eats up in search-and-display mode, where it docks to the bottom of the screen and refuses to be resized.

So why do I like SurfSaver so much? Because it's so simple to use yet powerful enough to have already become an essential part of my on-line life in the few weeks since I discovered it. It's cheap at $29.95 (£18.50) and there's a 30-day free trial offer for good measure. SurfSaver is available from www.surfsaver.com, or you can try the trial version on this month's cover CD.

Wavey's Outlook plea

My hunt for email client perfection continues. Last month I was enthusing about email 97, and before that it was Outlook Express, while along the way there have been many others including Eudora Pro, Pegasus Mail and Netscape Mail.

email 97 looked like the business, but during the couple of months I've been using it in anger I've noticed too many niggles for it to stay in my good books. Its inability to properly thread my incoming mail as my message base grew (I receive around 100 emails a day, so it doesn't take long to grow) grated, and what I at first thought was a nice feature - 'e-intelligence' - ended up being as annoying as Office's Paper Clip. 'This looks like a private message - would you like to encrypt it' is particularly infuriating, as nobody would be able to read it if I did, since email 97 adopts a proprietary encryption process.

And so, just as I was about to revert to Outlook Express full time, PC Pro saved my bacon. The June issue thudded onto my doormat, with its 'here, have Outlook 98 totally free matey' CD attached. I installed it and it works with no problems Chez Wavey, which may be because I'm already running a perfectly stable IE 4 installation, and am not a Lotus cc:Mail user (don't install Outlook 98 if you are, as it has an appetite for Lotus that may render your installation useless). I've found it to be fleeter of foot than Outlook Express ever was, relatively resource-friendly compared to the dismal pile of doings that went by the name of Outlook 97 and, perhaps most importantly for me, it's really rather Internet-friendly.

But let's start with the bugbears, and they are rather big bugbears. So, permit me to address these gripes directly to Microsoft by way of these pages.

'Dear Microsoft Outlook team,

1 When will you learn that the default message format on the Internet is plain text? Not Microsoft Outlook Rich Text, not HTML, and most certainly not Microsoft Word. So why don't you make the default message format upon installation the obvious one, plain text, which will get the least number of users into the least amount of trouble?

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