Wordperfect mail arrives 20 years late

Corel has launched an email client called Wordperfect Mail in a bid to tempt users away from Microsoft Outlook. The new utility, based on the Bloomba package from Stata Labs, includes features to enable you to import contacts and other information from Outlook and Eudora.

Richard Carriere, general manager for office productivity at Corel, said Wordperfect Mail, which has spam protection and a ‘very fast’ search facility, establishes Wordperfect Office suite as the only truly viable alternative to Microsoft Office.
Long-time users might feel that the launch comes 20 years too late. Wordperfect became the leading word-processing package in the mid-1980s partly because it supported just about every printer at a time when each application had to supply its own drivers.

It had hundreds of drivers for printers but not a single one for a modem, although most models obeyed the same Hayes command set. Email facilities were, as a result, a glaring omission from the remarkable early Wordperfect Office suite, which ran an otherwise full range of standard office applications within just 640KB of Ram.

The first feature of any length I wrote for PCW was a description of how to trick Wordperfect into emailing documents via a third-party comms package, but by that time, in the late 1980s, it was already becoming overshadowed by Word.

However, Word has never matched Wordperfect’s Reveal Codes feature, which allows direct editing of formats and would be a doddle to implement with Microsoft’s new XML files. It will be interesting to see if Office 12 does so ­ also about 20 years late.CA