From: Alan Olsen <alano@teleport.com>
Date: Thu, 5 Sep 1996 03:55:19 +0800
To: Joel McNamara <joelm@eskimo.com>
Subject: Re: Mail OnNet
Message-ID: <3.0b11.32.19960904090523.010d81e8@mail.teleport.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 05:10 PM 8/31/96 -0700, Joel McNamara wrote:
>In my never-ending search for the perfect PGP e-mail client, I just
stumbled >on to a beta of a product put out by FTP Software called Mail
OnNet.  Unlike >the Pronto Secure and Pegasus, this client actually has PGP
code (licensed >from PGP Inc.) built directly in.  No shelling out to DOS!

It is very nice.  It is a bit on the hard side to get.  (Took me three
tries.  It seems to time out the transfer if it is not completed within a
certain time frame.  I guess that is what I get for trying to download all
three parts at the same time.)

It does have the beta nature however.  I have found a couple of problems
with the program that make it so that i will not use it beyond testing.  The
people at FTP have been very responsive to e-mail, so I expect the problems
to be fixed soon.  They also seem to have no idea as to what it will retail
for.  With proper marketing, Eudora could be in real trouble.

>Very nice interface and almost complete idiot-proof
>encrypting/decrypting/signing.  Extremely powerful rules based processing too.

The interface design is very clean.  (It is nice seeing well designed dialog
boxes in a product. I have been using too much shareware lately I guess...)
The rules processing looks to be very powerful.  (Puts Eudora 3.0 to shame.)

>Check out:
>
>http://www.ftp.com/mkt_info/onnet32/try.htm
>
>IMHO, this is getting very close to transparent secure e-mail for the masses.

Now all they need is a remailer interface.

>Two notes.  (1) It only runs under Win95 and NT.  (2) It's ITAR restricted.

(3) It is bigger than a battleship.  The distribution is just shy of 10
megs.  Installed it is supposed to be about 45 megs.  (In perspective, a
full install of Visual Basic 4.0 "Professional" is about 50 megs.) 
---
Alan Olsen -- alano@teleport.com -- Contract Web Design & Instruction
        `finger -l alano@teleport.com` for PGP 2.6.2 key 
                http://www.teleport.com/~alano/ 
  "We had to destroy the Internet in order to save it." - Sen. Exon
                "Microsoft -- Nothing but NT promises."