This week’s totally nerdy news is that after about two or three years of dormancy,
my favorite e-mail program has been resurrected from the dead software bin. Last
week, I mentioned that I’ve been largely free of viruses because I keep my anti-virus
software updated, don’t use Outlook, and always only download headers, not the
entire e-mail. I dump the viruses and spam before they get to my computer.
A few astute readers noticed that I didn’t say what e-mail program I DO use,
just that I avoid Outlook. The reason was that my e-mail program, called Calypso
was old and totally unsupported. Until now.
I’d been using Calypso since about 1997 and was unwilling to move to Outlook
or one of its variants. At one point, I looked into alternatives, such as Eudora
and Pegasus Mail, but they made it more complicated to download only headers,
so I just stuck with Calypso, hoping that it wouldn’t crash and burn.
So after the reader inquired about my e-mail program, I looked once again at
the developer’s web site to see if anyone had done anything with Calypso. And
lo and behold I found out that someone finally bought it! A shareware company
called Rose City Software has picked it up. You can still get a freeware version
of the last build of Calypso (at http://www.rosecitysoftware.com/Calypso/).
Rose City also has upgraded the product and renamed it Courier. You can download
it and try it for 30 days for free Check Out Courier (Click the “Try” button).
Courier looks and acts almost exactly like Calypso with a few added (and welcome)
features. I downloaded the Courier upgrade and moved all my e-mail over. The
transition was so easy, it was sort of astonishing (nothing in computing is
usually this easy). I happily paid my upgrade price and am a registered user.
Because so much of what I do on a daily basis involves e-mail, finding Courier
was a big deal for me 😉