Xemacs Mail is found within the Xemacs editor. It compliments the systems very nicely, by allowing the user access to their mail system without having to leave the Xemacs editor. The intended audience is the UNIX with access to the full Xemacs editor.
The mailer is laid out in a very user friendly fashion. The user has a list of all their mail, the currently selected message is displayed in full under the list. It frustrated me that you were not able to click on a message from the list to view its contains, you have to use the next and previous buttons to go through each message until you reach the one you want.
The editor used is Emacs itself, so as long as your use to emacs and all those control commands, creating and editing messages is made easy. The editor also has a spell check button which executes UNIX ispell on the current mail message. A fairly good help section is also provided. They have placed a 'Don't Panic' button in the botton left hand corner. I though this was a great way to get the user out of a jam. Unfortunatly the button does not do much, it tells the user not to panic and type control-? for help. Not a very useful button after all.
The mailer is missing a couple useful features. A security system and the ability to attach files to the message. The attachment option is one which is sorly missed. As people start using e-mail as a primary source of communication over long distances the inability to attach a spread sheet or a picture will hinder the user. Text is not always was the best way of communicating your throughts to another party.
The system is also lacking the ability to allow users to set up their own personaly options, such as mail redirection, security, notification signals and so forth.
For each E-mail system we have come up with a few taskes, to preform. Each system will be evalutaed on how easy it is to complete each task.
Task 1) Create and send an E-mail message.
Creating a message is done by simply pressing the new message button. This opens another buffer in the editor which prompts you to enter an e-mail address, subject and body. Being experence at using Emacs I was ably to take advantage of all it's editing features, but a none Emacs user might have problems navigating it. Once I finished my test message, it took me quite a while to figure out how to send the message. There was no clear button to press and I had to type the message in again after loosing it, while looking for the send command.
Task 2) Create a Mailing List
There is no visiable way to create a mailing list in the Xemacs Mail program. There may be some sort of .mailing list file that you could create to load into the program, but no help could be found by myself.
Task 3) Send a message with an attachment.
Beginning a basic mailer, Xemacs is not equipted with an attachment option.
Task 4) Create a user alias, for example allow the user to just type Mike as the address rather then the receviers entire address.
Xemacs does not seem to support the creation of aliases, so I was not able to address this task.
Task 5) Forward and Reply to a message.
Forwarding and repling to mail is made fairly easy by clicking the forward or reply button. You are then given the option to edit the out going message before sending it. Unfortunatly you run into the same problem as task 1. How do you send a message.
Usability Study