From: John Roberts (jbr@pencoyd.com)
Date: Thu Oct 19 2000 - 21:31:00 PDT
On a different note...
For those of us not quite hardy enough to use pine/elm/TEPOYC (text
email program of your choice), and using consumer platforms
(Win/Mac), Eudora continues to be a solid choice for email
management. I use the sponsored v5.0 Pro because I need to support
multiple personalities (who doesn't?). But that's not the point,
because I don't care what you use.
The point: I really like the 5.0 version because they added a mostly
useless, but still entertaining, feature dubbed MoodWatch, which
simply denotes potentially offensive language (sent or received
email) with 1, 2, or 3 chili peppers, depending on the level of
"spice" in the text. You can even sort by peppers; not as useful as
sorting by date or title, but...
It's not efficient.
It's not powerful.
It's not intrusive (easy to ignore or turn off).
It's just fun.
Sure, if I were a procmail wizard or just curious enough to REALLY
use filters/rules to their utmost, I could come up with something
similar, perhaps even more useful. [More info/full description linked
at bottom.] But who wants to spend that time?
Most of all, I think software does benefit from... fun. That tiny
reminder that humans (to date, anyway) are creating our software
programs makes all the difference. Some companies/programmers don't
mind demonstrating a sense of humor.
FYI, the chili peppers almost always serve as a Tom Whore indicator
(the word Whore earns 2 chili peppers right away). Others of you have
to work harder to earn such distinction, unless your name is Dick. ;-)
Looking forward to more peppers,
John
- For a more detailed review of ALL of Eudora 5.0's features, try
this TidBITS review:
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06112>
- To cite the feature description from the Eudora website:
"MoodWatch is a new language tool that acts as an emotion monitor
for your email that flags aggressive language and calls it to your
attention. MoodWatch can detect aggressive, demeaning or rude
language in the email you send and receive by looking at both
individual words and complete phrases."
<http://www.eudora.com/email/features/moodwatch.html>
And you have to love that they cite a Carnegie Mellon white paper on flaming.
<http://www.eudora.com/presskit/pdf/Flaming_White_Paper.PDF>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Oct 19 2000 - 21:50:17 PDT