If you're wondering 'What's Oddpost?' and can't be bothered to hit Page Down, you can get up to speed here.
Well, I'm about a week into my trial of Oddpost and, on balance, things are going well. I am pulling mail into OP's IE interface from five seperate POP3 accounts. Three of these are with my UK-based ISP, another is the ubiquitous Yahoo WebMail and the fifth is my SquirrelMail account, sitting on my host's* box in Bakersfield, California. On top of this, I am subscribed to at least 9 RSS feeds at this time, including those of my buddies, Jason and Roger. All this means that after logging in over my 512k DSL link, it usually takes around 90-120 seconds to pull all this stuff into OP's clean and crisp three-pane interface.
Reading, sorting, filing and deleting mail is exactly as one would find in any other mail client. Drag and drop into user-created subfolders works fine and right click menus are abundant, making the OddPost experience a simple one. The spam filtering works well and improves every time I give it a helping hand by manually classifying the odd one that slips the net. Suspected spam gets triaged and held in a folder from where, with the wry humour evident right across the OddPost application, website and FAQ, baddies can be zapped with the 'nuke cloud' button and the goodies can be restored with the 'peace' symbol button.
Although not a biggie for me, the calendar seems more than capable and provides the usual web-based diary and scheduling functions that one looks for in such a service.
The only bug bear so far has been importing my address contacts. The FAQ gives basic details on importing from CSV files and mentions that Palm users like myself need to jump through a few more hoops to get from the vCard format to CSV. Having extracted and converted the contacts from my Clie with LinkeSOFT's excellent AIMEX, I tidied it up in OpenOffice.org 1.1 and then used OddPost's import function. After import, the address book was far bigger and obviously had added records but they were blank. I believe that this might be a field mapping issue and have sent a support request because various experiments with reordering CSV columns to match OddPost's address book columns have drawn a blank.
On the odd occasion that there has been a problem whilst using OddPost, there has nearly always been a useful error dialogue advising as to the likely cause and offering remedial advice or suggesting a bug submission. Such proactive tactics certainly help to give the end user more confidence that these niggles will get address in the next release.
So, to sum up, OddPost has delievered what it promised so far and has done so with some panache. I find that I have to remind myself that OddPost is actually an application and not just an interface for a webmail service. I am intrigued as to whether the long term experience will be as rewarding as the initial period.
Finally, Jason, amongst others, has commented on his disappointment that OddPost have chosen to implement only on the later versions of IE and, as yet, have not ported to Netscape/Mozilla, Opera, Eudora et al. For the reasoning behind that and a bunch more on the OddPost philosophy head over to unraveled's interview with Ethan Diamond, President and co-founder of Oddpost earlier this year.
* Chuck's crisply customer-focused and entirely excellent Thrust Networks.