FIGURE G

You can have up to five mailboxes in HandStamp Pro.

FIGURE H

You can choose to use IMAP4 or POP3 in MultiMail.

In Internet email, your mail resides on a post office server, called the SMTP (for Simple Mail Transport Protocol) server. In order to get your mail, you must tell your mail client about your SMTP server.

As Figure I shows, HandStamp provides a separate preference screen for SMTP configuration. You can select the mailbox to configure at the top of the screen. MultiMail, shown in Figure J, uses a sub-screen underneath the Mail Server window for each mailbox configured. Don't forget to substitute the name of your ISP's SMTP server and your email address here.

FIGURE I

HandStamp has a separate SMTP preferences screen.

FIGURE J

MultiMail pops up a useful SMTP configuration interface.

Signatures are common and useful devices in Internet email. They're intended to provide some summary contact information at the very end of each email message. Of course, some people get carried away with all sorts of weird and wacky ASCII art, but usually signatures are pretty prosaic things.

HandStamp, as you can see in Figure K, uses the same signature for all mailboxes. Figure L shows MultiMail, which lets you have a different signature for each mailbox. This works because the signature screen is a child of the SMTP configuration screen.

FIGURE K

You can configure HandStamp to append a signature to every message.

FIGURE L

MultiMail allows a unique signature for each mailbox.

And the winner isÉ
Based on the feature list, you can see that HandStamp and MultiMail are very comparable offerings. Both programs have worked well for me. Why do I choose to use one over the other?

Although I've used HandStamp for quite a while, and HandStamp Pro offers a couple of features I really like, I find MultiMail Pro to be the better product. Not only is MultiMail more reasonably priced, Actual Software offers excellent, timely technical and customer support. Actual Software employees are active participants on the PalmPilot newsgroups, and eagerly solicit feedback from the PalmPilot user community. Actual Software is also taking care of the overlooked Macintosh market, another point in their favor.

To be fair, I must say that SmartCode did an excellent job at finding and fixing the problem that FlashBuilder users, myself included, encountered. And, HandStamp 2.x is the only alternative for Pilot and PalmPilot Personal users who need direct email.

Claire Pieterek is a LAN/WAN designer at Whittman-Hart, Inc. in Denver. She has been a PalmPilot fanatic since buying a Pilot 5000 in May 1996.