PureVoice offers amazing new technology from the same company that has produced one of the oldest (yet still among the best) e-mail clients. In fact, Qualcomm's PureVoice is actually a plug-in extension for both the commercial Eudora Pro and freeware Eudora Light clients as well as a standalone player for any other mail client with multimedia MIME attachment capabilities. Like Bonzi's Voice E-Mail, PureVoice is a voice coding client that makes it possible to send voice messages via e-mail, but unlike its commercial predecessor, PureVoice is available free of charge. It also offers better compression rates and higher quality thanks to the innovative PureVoice and SmartRate technologies. PureVoice and SmartRate are both part of the CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) standard pioneered by Qualcomm and used in today's most advanced cellular telephones. Using this same state-of-the-art voice-encoding technology, PureVoice manages to combine high quality with excellent compression rates. The voice-coding technology in PureVoice compresses an incoming voice message to store it in the most compact digital format possible while still preserving the highest quality feasible. Users are given the option of maximizing voice quality at the expense of a slightly lower compression rate (PureVoice technology) or maximizing the compression factor at the expense of slightly lower quality (SmartRate technology). In either case, the voice messages that result are more than ten times smaller than .wav and comparable files yet sound as crystal clear as a normal phone call. PureVoice works with Eudora and other MAPI compliant clients as a plug-in -- all you need to do is record your voice message and press the 'attach' icon button. PureVoice handles the rest as the preferred mail client is opened with a new message window and the voice message already attached to the new e-mail message. For non-MAPI compliant mail clients, you'll need to first save the PureVoice voice message and then manually attach it to a new message using the client's normal attachment capabilities. As long as the mail client is a Windows 95/NT 32-bit client that offers both MAPI and long filenames support you'll be able to use it to send PureVoice encoded messages. As with Voice E-Mail, the only real downside to PureVoice is that unless both the sender and receiver have copies installed on their systems, the technology is wasted. For this reason, look for future releases of Eudora Pro and Eudora Light to include the PureVoice plug-in, making the technology available to an installed base of more than 18 million users. The difficult part will be getting additional mail clients to package PureVoice so that PureVoice users won't have to worry about their recipients not having the player. Only when enough people are utilizing PureVoice on their systems will this technology be able to realize its full potential. Still, with a freeware price tag and some amazing technology on its side, PureVoice should definitely be a player in the voice mail scene that is just waiting for a chance to explode onto the 'net. Pros: Makes possible voice-encoded e-mail messages, amazing compression rates and excellent quality, freeware client Cons: Both the sender and receiver must have copies of PureVoice installed on their systems, 32-bit release only For the latest information on PureVoice, check out: http://cws.internet.com/32mail.html#purevoice