• Download For Mac

The two main problems for the classic Mac OS geeks who still want to use their vintage Macs on a daily basis are browsing the Web and doing email. The Web browsing is the trickiest part, because it has changed a lot in these last ten years: standards, technologies, security, plug-in management and the like. Usually, those who want to try to browse around a bit will find that a combination of old browsers is mandatory, because sometimes iCab 2.99 renders a webpage less poorly than, say, Netscape Navigator 4.8; or Opera 5 handles some CSS more gracefully than Internet Explorer 5.

Download For Mac

There are always tradeoffs, especially in this territory, since the choices you have are limited to browser versions which are no longer supported. A notable exception is, currently under development and the only chance to have modern webpages display in a viewable, readable, usable manner for those who still use Mac OS 8.6 to 9.2. (This very blog renders correctly in the latest version of Classilla — 9.1 at the time of writing). But this post is about email and email clients. Email is generally more manageable in a classic Mac OS environment, and gives much fewer headaches than Web browsing today. Unless you want to retrieve and manage your Gmail account(s), that is. Towards the end of last week, I decided to do a casual experiment.

I hunted, downloaded and installed as many decent classic Mac email clients as I could and tried to configure a Gmail account in all of them. This is the list of clients I have tried so far (in alphabetical order):.

Claris Emailer 2.0v3. Classilla Mail module inside Classilla 9.1. Eudora 6.1.1. Eudora Light 3.1.3. Green Mail 1.0b13.

MacSOUP 2.8.3. Mailsmith 1.1.8. Microsoft Outlook Express 5.02.

Netscape Messenger (inside Netscape Communicator) 4.8. Netscape Mail module inside Netscape 6.2.3.

Netscape Mail module inside Netscape 7.0.2. Nisus Email 1.6.1. PowerMail 4.2.1 Where to find them All releases of Netscape browsers are at the. You can download Classilla from. Eudora, Eudora Light, MacSOUP, Nisus Email and PowerMail 4.2.1 can be downloaded from the email section of (a great reference site for Mac software, and one of the oldest, being online since 1995). The website of the developer of Green Mail 1.0b13 has disappeared, but you can still download Green Mail thanks to archive.org. Microsoft Outlook Express 5.02 should be bundled in Mac OS 9, while Mailsmith 1.1.x will be harder to find.

(My copy was graciously given to me by Mr Rich Siegel of Bare Bones Software, but I think it’s not cool to pester him. So if you have it laying around in some old hard drive or included in some old software CD-ROM, fine.) The Gmail test Since I already knew that some of these clients aren’t able to handle IMAP accounts, I only tried to set up a Gmail POP account. Thanks for this post Riccardo, detailed, well written and documented. I love classic macs and I love Gmail, I use this method to use both, a bit tricky but very effective: On OS X, using Stunnel, you can create an encrypted communication (SSL) as request by Gmail. All email clients without SSL support can receive and send using this connection, specifying the server for sending (SMTP) and receiving (POP) as “localhost” on a specific port.

I use it with MacSoup on my MacBook Pro and it works fine. In this way, all the classic macs email clients, even 68K, which are on the same network of the mac OS X with Stunnel up and running, can send and receive using as server the network IP address of the mac with Stunnel. This is the Stunnel homepage: This is an interesting guide to setup 68K macs for use SSL for modern email: If you want to try this method and need help, just let me know.