There's more going for it than just a nifty name!
Written: Nov 12 '99 (Updated Nov 17 '99)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: PGP compatibility, POP3 and IMAP4 support, multiple accounts, user-defined filters, can be used on your LAN in place of a POP3/SMTP mail server
Cons: takes a little getting used to-- not much, mind you.
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| elegiac's Full Review: The Bat! |
Tired of tapping your fingers and pacing around the room while Netscape Messenger starts up? Can't wait while M$ Outlook Express loads to check your e-mail? Rit Research Labs has a nice little solution for you-- The Bat! e-mail system.
The Bat! is easy to configure as a stand-alone e-mail client. You can configure the program to check as many POP3 or IMAP4 e-mail accounts as you have, at set intervals of time-- from every minute (just fine, if you have a fast connection to the internet) on up.
Already have your e-mail client configured, and you don't want to have a headache setting up a new program to use your e-mail account? No problem! You can import your e-mail account settings from MS Outlook Express ver. 4.x, Netscape Communicator ver. 4.x, Netscape Mail ver. 2.x/3.x, Pegasus Mail ver. 2.x, Eudora Lite, and Eudora Pro. You can also import your address books. How's that for convenient?
You can add filters to each account-- don't want to read any "Make $$$ Now!" mail? Here's how to sort it directly to your trash bin by using the "filter management" icon on the left side of your screen-- select "Incoming mail", click "New", name the new rule whatever you want, choose the "Trash" folder as your destination, and add "Make $$$ Now!" in the filtering string text box. Choose "Anywhere" for the location of the text, close the filter box, and poof! No more e-mail with that particular text string. It goes straight to your trash folder.
In addition, you can have The Bat! sort all of your outgoing and incoming mail by sender-- a wonderful feature if you save all of your e-mail, and want to have all of your correspondence neatly filed away. Just create a folder for each person you correspond with, and create incoming and outgoing filters to sort the e-mail to the proper folders. I just downloaded my entirely cluttered 3.0MB Yahoo! e-mail account-- and The Bat! has already sorted all of my e-mail for me.
The Bat! also has built-in PGP support, so you can kiss all your security concerns goodbye! No need to install an additional PGP plug-in, as long as you have a version of PGP installed on your system. There are the standard features here: public/private key pair usage, CAST, TripleDES, or IDEA encryption, the ability to purge passwords with a hotkey combination, and the ability to encrypt your e-mail by default.
The Bat! has a spell checker, a search, the ability to play a user-defined sound when you have new mail, can handle plain text or HTML mail, support for several different languages (British English, Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, and Ukrainian), an optional "mail ticker" which will scroll your new e-mail messages in a "ticker-tape" display, and the ability to act as a mailing list server. Don't have a mail server for your LAN? You can use The Bat! instead of using a POP3/SMTP server! That's all in addition to the standard e-mail program features.
The Bat! is a reasonably sized 1.51MB file-- not an excruciatingly long download by any means. And the program is well worth the wait. There are a number of free e-mail clients available, but none of them will compare to The Bat! for power or ease of use.
A fully functional trial version can be downloaded from Rit Research Labs at http://www.ritlabs.com/the_bat/download.html
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
elegiac
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Member: Gregory Chin
Reviews written: 70
Trusted by: 414 members
About Me:
My family operates a computer services business. Bit of hardware, bit of webstuff. Kooky, no?
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