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The Bat ofcourse, seriously, check this mail client out, it has all the features you could want...Includes PGP encryption as standard too. I use The Bat all the time.

By far the best email client under Windows is The Bat!. I've been using it for over a year and it's excellent, both in terms of its ease of use and its security. I've won it a few new converts too. Newbies like the fact they can attach files by dragging files from an Explorer window directly onto the text of their message. I like it because it has many privacy things built in such as placeholders for images when viewing HTML to stop spam merchants detecting who views their emails by embedding invisible external images.

It's also feature rich. View multiple accounts, threaded conversations, etc. The software is solid as a rock and regularly updated. It costs $35 but you get a month free trial. One thing I appreciated is when I went over the 1 month it didn't lock me out from my email, it just encouraged me to pay. All in all one happy chap.

Phillip.

Does anyone know a decent Windows email client (i.e. not Pegasus or Outlook) which does handle PGP messages?

Might I suggest The Bat!?

Funny name, yes, but it's rapidly become my second-favourite MUA (after KMail) and certainly my favourite on Windows. It has support for both PGP and S/MIME encryption and signing (although it uses its own built-in PGP implementation which I'm not entirely happy about). It's not free in any sense of the word either (it's 30-day trial shareware), but hey, this is Windows we're talking about.

The Bat! fits the bill, or at least comes very close. It has a clean UI, supports a lot standards, does HTML without images, has PGP support and great mail filters.

Unfortuanetly, it's Windows-only.

• very extensive filters and folder support
  
• html mail with internal viewer, no external links so spammers won't use the imageurl+emailaddress to verify the mail has been opened
  
• multiple accounts
  
• fast
  
• message templating
  
• built in pgp
  
• imap, pop, ...
  
• very extensive address book
  
• built in image viewer, macro support, spellchecker, regex support and much more ...
  

The Bat! has IMAP support, but it sucks. It sucks so bad, that if you're IMAP only, there is no way I could recommend this email client for you.

However, if you use POP3 and Windows, I have yet to find a better email client than The Bat!. The threading support, quick templates, per-folder identity settings, per account filtering, etc. is top-notch.

I had two complaints about The Bat!...IMAP support and newsgroup support. I've tried various newsreaders, but I didn't like any of them, and they seemed more difficult to use than The Bat! for filtering, etc. However, someone posted a link to MailTraq on one of The Bat! mailing lists, and with the free version of MailTraq, you can setup a news-to-mail/mail-to-news gateway that allows reading and responding to newsgroup postings in The Bat! I assume there are some alternatives to MailTraq on Linux, but it was easy to setup and as free as I needed it to be for my purposes.

For IMAP, you might want to take a look at Becky

Not need to be installed (no tampering with the system).

Be able to import Eudora adress books.

Be as small as possible.

Have an easy-to-use adress book.

Be freeware if possible.

Be configurable (looks, fonts, etc.).

Be able to handle multiple accounts.

Be able to read/remove HTML.

Pegasus and Eudora was both too large, so the list was narrowed down to:

Kaufman Mail Warrior.

Opera browser mail.

Poco mail

The bat!

i.Scribe

After trying these clients out separately for a while, I came to the conclusion that Poco mail fitted my list best. Not that it was outstanding in any way, the bat! and Kaufman was almost as good. I didn't like the interface of the bat though, and Kaufman, though very nice, had some problems with replying to HTML mails. The only things with poco that didn't fit my wish list is that it is not free and that it needed installation. Otherwise great program. I will be keeping an eye on Kaufman MW though. If some small details are improved, the client will rock.

If you know another WIN32 mail client that fits my wish list pretty close, please tell me. (Never satisfied :)

I'm one of those many recent OS X converts who just bought my first Mac, after years of having used Unix and Windows.

PGP is something I've played with over the years, like a lot of geeks, but never used religiously. But I decided a few months ago that it was something I should start using regularly, so I sought out a mail client with built-in PGP (or variant) support. I found a neat little (non-free) Windows e-mail client called The Bat! (that's their exclamation point, not mine), which had not only built-in support, but you can configure it to use PGP, GnuPG, and even their own OpenPGP implementation. That and many other cool features persuaded me to buy that e-mail client, after which time I decided to throw the switch and begin signing all e-mail that I send.

Along the way I discovered WinPT (Windows Privacy Tray), which is a decent little frontend for GPG. Remember, GPG is a backend -- how you interface with it is up to you.

The came my Titanium PowerBook. I got it for all the reasons mentioned around Slashdot and elsewhere, but I didn't really expect to find cool things like a good GPG frontend, let alone e-mail with GPG support. Boy was I wrong! I went to the GPG site and found a link to the Mac GPG site, which ports GPG to OS X. Not only the backend, but a frontend that integrates with the "Finder" (that's Mac-speak for the "Explorer" equivalent), right in the "Services" menu (which is much like the global right-click menu in Windows Exploror.

But that's not all! I saw further down on the same page that somebody else has written an extension to the OS X default mail client (which ain't as bad as you might think) that provides very good GUI GPG support for mail.

So, even though switching over to the Mac isn't the easiest thing in the world (I say that as I sit here typing on my Windows machine for reasons I won't go into), I can say that GPG is among the least of my problems.

RP

Some will say - "just don't go to those sites" but the fact is that I receive dozens of SPAM messages with pornographic images each week. These are unsolicited, and unwelcome. They appear in all of the mailboxes that I have, whether or not I use those addresses to post to usenet groups or websites.

Fair enough. This one at least has a fix: use a different mailer. I switched to software that does POP-polling (grabs at least "from" and "subject") for my mail, and lets me delete it from the server without ever having seen it.

Windows:TheBat![RitLabs]
Macintosh:MailSmith[BareBonesSW]

Any Linux suggestions?

HTH, --jas

The Bat.

Of course, you could also just encrypt your old mail file. How often do you go through mail from 1998 anyway?

Here's a secret tip: OpenXP is the open source version of legendary mail/news offline reader "CrossPoint". It runs in a console window, is very fast, and has all the features you could ask for, including support for various protocols and its own dialer (you can also use an existing Internet connection). OpenXP may take a while to get used to, but it's definitely worth it. I've used CrossPoint from ca. 1993-1996, and a friend still uses it today, although he doesn't care about the new versions.

For mail on Windows, I've been using Pegasus Mail for quite some time. It's more than a decade old and was recently released in version 4.0. Its interface, while graphical, takes a bit to get used to, and it's not open source (Windows freeware doesn't have Unix' open source tradition because of the lack of free compilers), but it is extremely feature-rich, renders HTML (terribly) and supports the Unix mailbox format for its folders. Only downside: I don't know if this relates to crashes of my NT machine (different story), but I've had some mail indexing problems with Pegasus, which made the search ignore some messages.

The situation was much worse with Netscape Messenger, which is the reason I haven't tried out Mozilla's successor yet: Messenger once ate a whole huge mailbox of mine during the process of "reorganization", when not enough disk space was available for this. So I would definitely be careful with Mozilla's Mail module, especially since it's not yet widely tested: You want your mailer to be reliable and not to lose data, ever.

Another semi-free contender is The Bat!, which is trialware and costs 25 bucks for students. I've heard very good things about it, but I have not yet had the need to switch from Pegasus.

On Linux, there are many more choices, and good things are increasingly being said about Ximian's Evolution -- perhaps it will be ported to Windows? Similarly, Balsa and KMail are nice graphical e-mail clients, and there's a huge list of text-mode clients which all have their strengths and weaknesses. You really don't have to decide on either one permanently because they can all access the same mailbox files (neat, huh?). Generally, because of the interoperability and reliability of Unix mail, if you have a choice, I recommend using a Unix system for all email. It may be a bit trickier to set up at first, but once you have a nice procmail and mailer(s) configuration running, you won't want to switch back.

Outlook sucks and it's one thing I hated about Windows. I've tried so many email clients, both on Windows and Linux, and either their user interface is klunky or it's bug-ridden (one wiped all my mail!). The Linux email clients usually had the edge so I used one of these (I have two boxes side by side, one Win2k and one Linux). Then I discovered The Bat!, which I find to be the best by a large margin. It's not free (30-day free trial) but is so worth the money. Hence I was excited when I heard about an advanced email client called Evolution for Gnome... and groaned out loud when I saw it was an Outlook clone. Why???

I don't buy the "it's easier for people to shift from Outlook" argument. I know plenty of non-techies that had no problem switching from Outlook to Eudora. On the other hand it's good there *is* an Outlook clone for those that really want it. Perhaps some ex-Win32 users will find it a comforting stepping stone. The Evolution team are to be congratulated for providing this. Sadly it's not for me.

Phillip.

I usually receive my email in text, using a package on Windows called The Bat, because it's simple, reliable (I've regularly got 4000+ messages in my Inbox, 99% spam) and was the first I found off Tucows which performed mail handling to my satisfaction (after spending years with pine, before my Evil ISP took away my shell account.)

To the point. I haven't had a chance to download and trial Ximian, but a spam I recieved, twice, in the past couple days, reminded me of features which would be great for an email manager:

the ability to view only in text, not executing any scripts

the ability to execute, in a debugging/diagnostic mode, what javascript is doing

The latter I performed by saving a suspicious spam to a file and then cleaning it up and nutering it sufficiently to I could see what it was attempting to do. As expected, it unpacked some urls and attempted to open windows.

The beauty of this being an Open Source project, is that there's hope that a feature, rather than completely out of the question in Outlook.

The spam javascript can be viewed here.

My bad. I really thought Smart Tags in the beta version of IE6 pointed to sport results and stock quotes on MSNBC, or something like that.

I didn't remember that STs were also disabled by default either, and that's a good point. Still, as another slashdotter remarked, even if disabled, you never know if the system won't sooner or later pop up a window suggesting you enable that "new exciting feature" or something, so that Joe Doe turns it on on his own. I can't see why they would make the meta-tag work on an opt-out basis if they don't specifically intend STs to be used by default. Maybe they're being stupid, or frighteningly arrogant, and not just evil, alright, but I'm not going to trust them like that. They kind of... have been known not to mind excessively aggressive practices, shall I say. :)

Oh -- as for email clients (-1; Offtopic), since security sounds like an important feature to me *g* I personally use either mutt, Netscape, which is not good at all (but my experience of it kind of makes up for it, or so I dare hope :)), or sometimes Sylpheed, but many guys at my (CS) school ended up choosing The Bat! and are very happy with it. Not anywhere as versatile as good old mutt, of course, but text-based things can be somewhat arid, alright. I've used Outlook on a couple of occasions, and just can't stand it, it's moronic design security-wise and its "I'm dumbed down client aimed at lowest-common-denominator masses" feel. Different tastes, I suppose.

-- B.

For banner ads, it's relatively easy: bind the ad picture server's DNS entry to 127.0.0.1 in etc/hosts (don't do this to images.slashdot.org, you'll lose the headline graphics! Besides, those are the ads that you don't mind too much!). The 468x60 gif files will be replaced by a red X icon!

The downside is that a well-populated HOSTS file will block ads, but also prevents access to some sites. They seem to have some convoluted redirect scheme that requires the ads to display.

s0lar

First thing to note, comparison based on out-of-box. That means none of the add-ons are considered at all. Let me go through and comment each with add-ons included.

Full Email: They list "No" for the Palm. Multimail Pro provides it, so I consider that a Yes if I ever wanted to do email on a palm sized computer. Of course we're talking Pocket Outlook Express here. Considering the Deja poll on email clients has OE in the middle of the pack with the only two clients I recommend (PMMail and The Bat! topping the list chances are I'd look for third party email even if I were going to.

Web-Browsing: Well, considering the resolution (320x240) there aren't many sites that will come across looking decent in the first place. On a palm sized computer I prefer only snippits and text. IE, content instead of fluff. This is doubly true when you consider the bandwidth restrictions of wireless communications.

AvantGo: Was a pig on the Palm, most likely a pig on MS's stuff and, IMHO, not worth a damn. I get more use out of iSiloFree and their web convertor for a fraction of AvantGo's space.

Color: Hope the sun isn't out, right? :)

Memory: 16-32Mb given. This is MS, something tells me 24Mb of it would be needed just to store everything they want to shoehorn in there leaving 8Mb, what the Palm offers. :)

Speed: Up to 206Mhz compared to the Palm's 20Mhz. Of course, all the MS applications aren't coded as tight as Palm applications so they feel like it is 20Mhz. Honestly, I have a Palm IIIe that I have used Afterburner II to slow-down to save on battery life. I normally run at 13Mhz compared to the normal 16Mhz and it is fine. Most of the time the machine is idling anyway. Isn't like we've got RC5 going in the background.

Expansion Slot: Welll, ok, they got it there, maybe.

Sync: "Always ready to go with ActiveSync!" Like, ActiveX? ActiveDesktop? Uhm, I dunno about you but me, I'm fine with pushing a single button.

USB connection: Aaand? USB may be nice but I've not really worried over a sync before.

IrDA: No comment

Handwriting Recognition: OK, everyone who can't read their own handwriting please raise their hands. Grey raises his hand. I like Graffiti because it is easy. Microsoft really is going for the lazy people here. "No more buttons to press, don't have to learn an input system that 90% resembles what you write anyway!"

Voice Recording: Why? With 32Mb you can barely cram anything into that of any value. Besides, there are add-ons for the Palm that allow this.

On-Board Financial Software: Wow, Money for PocketPC included. Works with Microsoft Money 2000. I use Quicken 2000 and PocketQuicken on my Palm. Wow, imagine that.

Mapping Software: "Clarity of maps confined to low resolution screens." 160x160 compared to 320x240. Both of those, to me, are low resolution. Besides, those same low resolution screens work fine on specialized GPS devices for years now. I don't need the extra space for an effing animated streetsign (2nd cousin to the paperclip) to tell me to turn left now. One back-seat driver will be quite enough, thank you. Needless to say there are several applications for the Palm that provide this as well as several GPS modules for the Palm.

Play MP3s: "No need to carry an additional MP3 player". Pocket PC, 32Mb. Rio, IIRC, 96Mb. There is a reason why I don't want my Palm to do MP3s, the specialized device does it better.

Text reader: iSilo, Peanut Press, DOC format (dozens of readers there) TealDOC, etc, etc, etc

Animated Games: The whole reason I started writing this. First off, I hate the corpspeak "experience". "A wonderful web experience!" "A great gaming experience!" "That new Star Trek show furthers the TV experience!" Get over it, it isn't an experience, it is a game. Furthermore, I guess Zap 2000! doesn't count as an animated game. What comes standard with the Palm PC that is awesome? Solitaire and Minesweeper? Definintely have to look add-on here in both cases.