At our April 2002 meeting, Don Altman, our presenter, praised his e-mail client program, Polarbar Mailer. As he assured us, this is not a typographical error. Although the splash screen for the PBM is a polar bear, the name came from the Polar Bar where the developers hung out while they were working on it.I was intrigued, and went to their site: www.polarbar.org . The site gives very brief downloading and installation instructions, but for me, it was not enough, especially because Polarbar Mailer requires Java Runtime Environment (JRE).

The good news is that with JRE, Polarbar runs not only on Linux, but Win95/98/ME/NT/2000, OS/2, BSD, Warp 4, and even Mac OS. Probably WinXP as well. They kindly point you to several sites from which you can get the .tgz file you need for Java. Even after I installed Java in my Linux box (Mandrake 8.1) and ran the (Java) demo successfully, I was frustrated by PBM. Fortunately they have a very knowledgeable and responsive Support List which eventually got me disentangled.

Evidently Java is up to 2+ but Polarbar works better (or at least easier) with 1+. I downloaded jre1.1.8 from www.blackdown.org . You are told to run: jre -cp polarbar.zip org.polarbar.mailer which supposedly installs the mailer each time you run it. It is more complicated than that! The polarbar.zip file is what you untar from the download, and you are warned against unzipping it. OK, but the
"-cp" is a trap - it is an option for jre which means polarzip is a class-path. However, it would not install until I told it where java's classes.zip file lived. Even then, although it installed and ran, it had a nasty tendency to hang, particularly after clicking a few of the icons in the tool bar.

Finally a kind soul in the Support List advised me to add another option: -nojit to the -cp meaning to instruct jre NOT to use 'just in time' compiling. Here's the script file line from which I was finally able to run a stable version of Polarbar Mailer, and I love it. (my jre is in /java/polarj/bin and the classes.zip is in /polarj/lib. My polarbar zip file is named pbm121b.zip and lives in /polarbar/ all of these directories being under my personal account) /java/polarj/bin/jre -nojit -cp /polarbar/pbm121.zip:/java/polarj/lib/classes.zip org.polarbar.mailer Someone threw me off for a while by saying the two class paths should be separated by a semicolon. The colon is correct. The whole command goes on one line, of course, and 'org.polarbar.mailer' is separated from the classes by a space. Far superior to Outlook Professional or anything else I've tried to use. Enjoy!