Tech that I miss: Email Tagline Inserter

I’ve been online a long time. My first computer, purchased in 1988, was an IBM PC-AT clone boasting an 80286 CPU running at a blistering 12 MHz. It had a 14.4K modem and I started using CompuServe to get online. Initially running MS-DOS, over time I transitioned to IBM’s OS/2. This is how I came to use an email client known as PMMail from Blueprint Software Works. PMMail was the superlative email client for OS/2.

As OS/2 waned (and eventually collapsed) in the marketplace, PMMail was ported to Windows as PMMail 2000. So, my email history migrated to Windows without issue. I continued to use PMMail 2000 Pro for many more years. In fact, I used it until my employer forced me onto Outlook in 2006.

Even when forced to use Outlook I kept PMMail around. It was Win32 program that really did not run well on anything after Windows XP. For a long time, I maintained a Windows XP virtual machine with a copy working copy of PMMail installed. Sadly, that VM was lost to a hard drive failure.

PMMail was not fancy, but it was very powerful. It made using multiple email accounts very simple. It had a great filter engine. Incoming messages could be sorted & filed, or trigger complicated actions. It was way beyond simple auto-responses. Even today, Outlook has nothing even similar.

PMMail also had a way for auxiliary programs to hook into the process of a message being sent. I used an automated tag line program that would append a quote to the signature block of every email I sent.

Over time I amassed a list of several hundred quotes. Carefully curated, they were in various categories; inspirational, funny, rude, sci-fi, song lyrics, etc. Each recipient in my contact list would see random quotes from one or more of the categories.

Over the years, a lot of people commented that they found the random quotes interesting or amusing. Alas, that stash of amusing stuff was lost as well. I could rebuilt the collection, but there’s no way to use it in Outlook.

It’s sad that this sort of thing never really caught on in the stodgy realm of Microsoft Office & Outlook. Outlook is to email as Vogons are to interstellar governance, “They are one of the most unpleasant things in the Galaxy. Not actually evil, but bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous.”

And don’t get me started about Gmail….