WordPerfect Mail

Corel's WordPerfect Mail is an inexpensive, easy-to-use email client with good spam-filtering, calendaring and RSS-newsreader tools. Although it's simple to master, this email client has a few shortcomings, including weak support for the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP). Other downsides are expensive telephone support and poor integration with Corel's online support site. Then again, WordPerfect Mail, which is based on Stata Labs' Bloomba email client, offers a simple-to-navigate interface, and it's a bargain compared with Microsoft's ubiquitous Outlook. We think WordPerfect Mail is a good choice for budget-minded small businesses seeking a reliable email client, but it's not compelling enough to woo current Outlook users. Corel sells WordPerfect Mail separately for £40 (inc. VAT) or bundled with its £149 WordPerfect Office 12 Small Business Edition suite.

Setup & interface
WordPerfect Mail installs in less than five minutes -- but expect a longer setup if you're importing messages and contact information from another email client. The handy Import Wizard guides you through the conversion process by transferring email settings and data from major clients such as Outlook 1998, 2000 and 2002; Netscape 4.x and 7.x; as well as recent versions of Eudora. Conversion is quick and convenient, but also imperfect. In our tests, for instance, the Import Wizard transferred settings from just one of our pair of Outlook email accounts -- despite WordPerfect Mail's support for multiple email accounts. We had to configure the second account manually. This program's interface is straightforward to master. The left-column Navigation pane lists all folders (Inbox, Spam, Deleted and so on); the Preview pane displays the contents of a selected message; and the Mail toolbar and the Search bar provide fast access to frequently used features such as Send/Receive, Compose and Forward. We particularly liked the Calendar Peek in the lower-left corner, which is great for quickly checking your daily appointments. In Microsoft Outlook, by comparison, you have to open the Calendar to view the same information. WordPerfect Mail's text editor provides all the standard tools for composing email messages, such as spell-checking, email signatures and font formatting (bold, italic, numbering, bullets, and so on). Of course, you can insert GIFs, JPEGs, and other images into email and attach other files, too.

Features
WordPerfect Mail has a lot going for it, starting with solid spam-blocking and search tools. It costs only £40 (inc. VAT) -- considerably less than Microsoft Outlook. And Corel's email client has an integrated Really Simple Syndication (RSS) newsreader; Outlook does not, although third-party RSS add-ins such as NewsGator are available. The WordPerfect Mail Smart Groups wizard makes it easy to manage your RSS subscriptions and online mailing or distribution lists (such as news articles and blog entries) and route them directly to specific folders. With RSS feeds, you can choose from Corel's slim selection of 11 popular feeds, or you can use the wizard to manually subscribe to a feed by entering its title and URL. The wizard is easy to use, but we'd like to see more pre-selected feeds. By contrast, Pluck, a great newsreader and a winner of ZDNet's Editors' Choice award, comes with dozens of pre-programmed feeds. WordPerfect Mail also conducts speedy searches of email, contacts, attachments and calendar appointments. Using the convenient Search bar (underneath the Mail toolbar), you can find information within email in seconds. This comes in handy for those of us who hate organizing email into folders -- for whom an inbox is synonymous with a dumping ground. Outlook has a speedy search window as well, but WordPerfect Mail gains a search advantage through its Quick Search buttons in the Subject and From fields of email message headers. By clicking Quick Search in the From field, for instance, you can easily find all email from the same sender -- something that Outlook can't do. Unfortunately, WordPerfect Mail needs to beef up its Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) support. IMAP lets you manage your email without downloading it from the mail server, allowing you to view the headers of messages and download only the ones you want to read. IMAP also lets you create and move folders as well as delete and search messages that remain on the server. Currently, WordPerfect Mail users who want to import IMAP mail and folders from their Internet providers need to download messages using their previous email program, and then import them into WordPerfect Mail -- a clunky procedure.

Service & support
WordPerfect Mail users get free email support, but phone assistance can be very expensive: $25 (~£14) per incident; a trio of support calls costs $70 (~£39), a five-pack $100 (~£55). Corel promises to answer your emailed queries within one business day -- a pledge our tests proved accurate. But we'd like to see better links within WordPerfect Mail to Corel's support site. Currently, when you select WordPerfect Mail Help from within the program, the help file that pops up doesn't link to the more extensive tips on Corel's Web site.