The Bat! version 1.60q is a light weight e-mail program that stands up to the big bullies like Outlook, Eudora, Pegasus and others.
The Bat! has quite an impressive array of features, and in comparision to Outlook or Eudora mail, it is much more customisable and easy to automate for variety of tasks. The Bat! supports all standard protocols like POP3 (Post Office Protocol), IMAP4 (Internet Message Access Protocol: version 4) and SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) seamlessly with additional abilities to handle various authentication schemes like RFC 2554, APOP, options to use MD5 security and to store passwords on iKey, etc.
The Bat! can even serve as a network Mail Server for Local Area Networks with a single Internet access point. It also has built-in abilities to handle mailing lists modestly like MajorDomo and Listserv
Thus the Bat! is versatile enough to play in the league of the big guys as well as serve as a simple_to_use mail client for your kid sister.
If you are looking for sheer functionality, The Bat! won’t be a sorry disappointment. I wouldn’t praise the Bat! to skies, (prejudiced as such I am) but it does pack quite a punch while getting your job done, whether it is to check, retrieve and neatly classify your 100+ daily cocktail of e-mails, or send back reading confirmations and automated messages while you are on a trip.
Let’s take a closer look at those features that matter.
Security: The Bat! supports openPGP and S/MIME. I use gnuPG, which is an open source analogue to the great PGP. The Bat! makes it simple to encode and secure your messages from unauthorised reading and/or modification while in transit over the net. Thus you can efficiently prevent impersonation of your identity which in my opinion matters for serious communications.
Multiple Mailboxes: All clients worth their salt have multiple-account possibilities. The Bat! differs in many ways, for example, each mailbox account has its own set of standard folders, which are especially useful for IMAP accounts, and a very handy implementation of Templates. If you handle a huge amount of messages, you will appreciate the templates feature which enables you to create customised templates for writing new mail, replying and/or automatic answering messages.
When I am writing a official letter to my colleague, I can edit the ’From’, ’Replyto’ and other fields of the message as well as add custom headers to the mail which you cannot possibly do in Outlook. It gives the letter a bespoke touch which your tech savvy friends might notice and appreciate if put to thoughtful use.
Filters: The crowning feature of The Bat! is its Filters, called as the Sorting office. You can set up filters for virtually any aspect of a mail whether incoming, outgoing, read or replied mail and The Bat! will automatically sort them out to specific folders according to this set of rules. The stings for the filters can be almost anything, right from the name of the sender to specific words in the message.
Editor: The Bat! has the most versatile text based editor available for any client. While HTML or richtext (two irritating features IMHO) is not supported, the editor will do much of the dirty work that goes into making a message conform to universal etiquette of readability including taking care of character encoding sets. The spelling checker is satisfactory.
Display, Interface: A no-nonsense interface that is simple as well as functional is a hallmark of The Bat!. It also comes with a Ticker that looks like a Stock-market stroller on Bloomberg and is a pleasant addition to the desktop, if you can bring yourself to like it. When The Bat! has finished checking for new messages silently in the background, it displays the headers so that you can right away click on the display and read the message. The Menus are placed logically so you can easily teach your Mom about purging the mailbox of duplicate mails and compressing the folders. The Icons are so so.
The Find feature goes deep enough to dig out the mail you are looking for, even if you doubt its existence!
Checking Mail: The Bat! takes extensive advantage of Windows’ multitasking capabilities to check a number of accounts simultaneously (Outlook can’t do that!!) and even give you a list of all the mail on the mailbox before they are downloaded to your computer. If you get a lot of spam, this gives you a chance to purview the message-body-lines of a suspicious mail and delete them right off the server without bothering to download them. The mail checking function is logged and the logs are easily accessible. The Bat! has many modes of authorisation for POP as well as SMTP. Some ISP’s and Mail Providers require that the POP account be logged into before you can use their SMTP servers to send mail. The Bat! can do ’POP before SMTP’ authentication along with separate SMTP authentication if needed.
Memory and Processor Usage: The Bat! uses fewer threads/processes for its functioning and memory load is minimal. It loads fast and while minimized to the system tray, stays silent while checking for mail with user-indicated regularity.
Mail Handling: All messages are stored in folders reflecting the structure in the individual accounts on your hard disk. You can specify the location of these folders. The Bat! compress the folders and can even archive them into smaller sized compressed files by filtering out unwanted data of headers in the messages. Attachments of the mails can be stored seperately for easier and direct access. The Bat! can export your mails in .msg/.eml (e-mail message) or .mbx (Unix mailboxes) or the good ol’ text format for import into a variety of other mail clients including Outlook. Thus migration/transfer of mails to any other program or for saving to send to others is a breeze.
Little thoughtful tools make all the difference:
For example, finding a mail reply message that you had send is a mouse click away.
To read the RFC-822 Headers of a message for finding the IP address of the sender or other useful information you don’t need to fumble with menus; a click will do.
Parking messages is to ensure that you or The Bat! doesn’t accidentally or otherwise delete/move an important mail.
Viewing messages in a threaded mode will avail you of the luxury of sorting long ongoing mail discussions in perspective at a glance.
Address auto-completion will cozily take care of petty laziness.
The address book is another strong point of The Bat!: It supports vCards, has all the needed/useless fields for recording various data of your contacts. It can import and export addresses from a variety of clients as well as comma-separated/tab delimited files exported from Outlook in addition to popular vCards. Thus you can easily and regularly keep your address books from various programs like your Organisers, Personal Information Managers, Handhelds/PDA’s in symphony.
The Bat! behaves perfectly in a networked environment, whether a LAN or a simple peer-2-peer connection and can function in three modes: As a mail server for a LAN, or as a independent client for a single Computer or as a Client for a workstation on a network.
The Bat! renders HTML based messages into simple text for display while you can open to see the original HTML format if necessary. This saves much time and is very convenient on slow machines.
The Bat! can also display picture attachments in common formats like JPG, GIF, TIFF, PNG from within the program without the need to open an external viewer.
The Bat! is unaffected by worms and virus that plague MS Outlook and other clients.
The Bat! supports about 15 languages. The Interface can be transformed to any of these 15 languages on the fly from the menu.
Comments are most appreciated.