Traditional Email Returns with O E Classic.

I was alerted yesterday by Dean Martineau's Top Tech Tidbits newsletter about an Email client called OE Classic. As the name might imply, it has been designed for people who miss the simplicity and ease of use of Microsoft Outlook Express.

I've always been on the lookout for a replacement Email client. My wife really enjoyed using Outlook Express, but as she graduated to more modern computers, it was not possible to work with it any longer. So over the years, if I've heard about a potential replacement, I've jumped straight on it to try to replace the functionality she had. I believe this program may well do it.

Some people are new to computing and Email. There are also those, such as my wife Lulu, who understand it completely, but they do not need to have a calendar and all the other utilities which may come with a program such as Outlook or even Thunderbird, which is why Outlook express was so useful.

OE Classic is exactly what it says. In the most part, there are four windows which can be tabbed through: a folder list, list of contacts (as it has an address book), the message list pertaining to the folder, and a preview area for reviewing the focused message. This preview area is not recommended, and the message can simply be opened by pressing Enter.

Without exception as far as I can see, all the keystrokes which you may have used with Outlook Express will work. This even extends to tasks such as moving messages to folders etc.

In terms of accessibility, Lulu uses JAWS, and there are a number of significant issues with that. JAWS does not read the content of the message or folder list, a number of the fields are not labelled when composing a message, and there are some focus issues when closing messages.

However throughout the night, I have written the majority of some scripts to deal with all of these issues. I believe that the Outlook Express and Outlook scripts from Freedom Scientific are the gold standard. That is what I am aiming for and I am in touching distance of achieving it.

When you install the scripts, which will be available free from our company website, or in time incorporated into our Leasey product, you should find the experience very similar to Outlook Express. The availability should be within the next week or two at the latest.

When you create scripts for an Email client, there is a lot you have to think about, such as, will a person know that a message is unread? Will the presence of attachments be announced? When you press the Delete key, will the next message be announced? What about moving through the folder list, will you hear how many messages are unread in that folder? All of that work is done already, together with the Address Book. The Options dialog also needs some work. Leasey users are likely to get additional functionality, because I hope I can get our LeaseySelect feature to work in there, for highlighting long blocks of text.

So keep an ear on my Twitter feed and I'll post a message to say they can be downloaded. You can try OE Classic for yourself any time by visiting this page. There are two versions. The free one does from time to time display advertisements promoting the pro edition, but if you can live with those, it's free.
https://www.oeclassic.com/