Happy Trails Computer Club

You may have picked up clues that I like the Courier email client a lot. Full disclosure: Because I do, and because I want keep using it in the future, I'd like to see it continue to thrive. I just hope a few of you will try it and like it. (I'm also a fan of Mozilla, as you might have gathered, and I'm rooting for it too.) Courier does cost $29.95, but it's well worth it if you use email a lot. Mozilla is free.

General

You can move your messages, account information and other settings from one computer to another and back again very easily just by moving one file. It's very handy for snowbirds who have a computer at each end of their flight path. The mailbox file contains your mail and everything you need to access your mail from any other computer. Your messages, address book and account information and settings are all contained in this single mailbox file. Try that with Outlook Express.

Protection from viruses, worms, Trojan-horses, etc.

To set up Courier for protection from hostile email:

Click Mailbox > Properties > and then the Security tab. Check the "Set Plain Text as default mail view" and "Display warning when opening monitored file types" options. That's it -- you're done. That's because the default settings are very secure already.

In addition, the Courier Address Book is encrypted. This means that an Internet worm cannot access your address book and send itself to all of your contacts.

If you set Courier to use Plain Text as the default viewing mode, HTML messages will open in Plain Text mode. You can easily toggle to HTML viewing mode in a message window by clicking on the HTML tool bar button, or using the Ctrl+W hotkey combination. You can modify the way Courier handles the vulnerable HTML format by disabling a variety of HTML options. Courier's default settings turn off the execution and downloading of any scripts, Active X components and linked graphics files. You can adjust these settings in the HTML Security Settings Panel.

If you miss the preview pane in Outlook Express, the security features in Courier mean you could have a preview pane back again. With the Courier safeguards, accidentally viewing a hostile message in the preview pane will not trigger an attack your computer.