Random Developments

For quite a long time (ever since I outgrew Spry Mail) I was a user and evangelist for Becky (aka Rebecca), an excelent mail client from a (I think) small company in Japan. I still think it is a great software, with very useful features you can’t find anywhere else, but I recently switched to Thunderbird both at home and at work. And here’s why.

Becky is not open source (it’s not free, either, but this is not a problem for me; I bought a license years ago, and it was a good buy), and it seems to suffer from what I call the “lone developer syndrome”. That is, there is a small team working on it and there’s no way they can include everything that is expected from an e-mail application these days. For example, it does not do SSL, or any kind of digital signing. Even its sort-of-built-in support for PGP is awkward, to say the least.

Also, its built-in editor has a real problem when it comes to breaking long lines: its behaviour is very often exactly the opposite of what you’d expect, and rarely seems like the right thing to do. It also does not like multi-byte encodings (you can’t use accents in letters when using UTF-8, for example, which does sound weird). Speaking of UTF-8, Becky’s support for international charsets is surprisingly weak for a software that comes from Japan; I was never able to see Asian (or even Eastern European) characters in the message list. And don’t even think about sending HTML messages with Becky; it allows you to try, but the result may not be what you expect.

Becky does have a lot of good features, including two of the ones in the wishlist from my previous post. It is also very fast and light, so much so that it runs nicely in a lowly Pentium 100Mhz with 32 megs. It has the best remote handling of POP3 mailboxes (that is, handling the mailbox without actually downloading the messages) that I have seen since, well, Spry Mail (does anyone else even remember Spry Mail ?). It allows you to edit messages you received. It does IMAP exceedingly well. It even does NNTP, with the help of a plug-in.

But, worst of all (IMHO), it displays HTML messages by using an Internet Explorer component, and we all know how reliable and secure IE is. In fact, this is what prompted the switch for me: I had to small almost-incidents because of junk messages with content that caused undesired behaviour in IE and, in my environment, I can’t afford not reading HTML messages.

I still use Becky to check my work mailbox from home without downloading the messages, and my SO also uses it both at work and in her notebook, so in the end I did not leave Becky entirely. But you can say that our relationship is certainly cooler than it used to be.

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