What is an email client?  Outlook Express and Thunderbird are referred to as email ‘clients’. They are programs on your computer whose main goal in life is to manage your email. An email client therefore is a computer program that is used to read and send email. Protocols supported by email clients include POP3 and IMAP. IMAP and the updated IMAP4 are optimized for storage of email on the server, while the POP3 protocol generally assumes that the email is downloaded to the client. The SMTP protocol is used by most email clients to send email.

Becky! Internet Mail 2.29

http://www.rimarts.co.jp/becky.htm

Becky! began as software specifically designed for Internet email in 1996. Today, it has become one of the most successful shareware email products. With the totally renewed Becky! Ver.2, it’s become more stable, faster, and feature-rich without losing its most important virtue: ease of use. You can create multiple mailboxes and multiple ‘profiles’ for each mailbox. This feature is especially useful if you use a laptop. You can switch between several different settings, like ‘LAN’ and dialup, for the same mailbox. You can write HTML email with Becky! With a unique ‘Reminder’ capability, you will receive email from ‘you’ on the scheduled date. You can even schedule sending email messages to someone else. You don’t have to remember your friends’ birthdays — Becky! does. It also comes with a PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) plug-in preinstalled, which lets you encrypt messages before sending them. Only one downside–it’s priced at $40. Seems too much for just an email client.

Eudora 7.1

http://www.eudora.com/

With this client, you can play music to signal new mail. What’s more, Eudora 7.1 has the ability to save search criteria. It allows you to add a picture or logo to your signature. The best part is the improved IMAP that synchronizes and accesses email from multiple computers and locations. A special mention must be made of Eudora Sharing Protocol (ESP). This automatically syncs and shares files with family, friends and co-workers. No need for a separate server or resending large attachments. Also, Eudora shows Email Usage Stats that offers private, personal and interesting insight to your day-to-day email activity and patterns. It’s a solid email client and comes in two versions:  Sponsored and Light. Sponsored has more features than Light, but contains ads. Both versions are free.  At the end of the day, Eudora is well made, but will be somewhat tough to get used to. Eudora is soon moving to open source, opening the possibility for plenty of growth in time. You can read up on the project here: http://wiki.mozilla.org/Penelope

IncrediMail Xe

http://www.incredimail.com/english/splash/splash.asp

With so much color and animation, IncrediMail is geared toward introducing children to the world of email. But it’s definitely the best looking email client around. Enjoy a huge gallery filled with 1000’s of emoticons. Place cool emoticons in your email messages. What’s more, IncrediMail has 1000’s of email backgrounds you can use in your email messages. See your messages change into exciting 3D objects like a sailing boat or flying helicopter when sending, receiving and even deleting your email.  It also allows for personal handwritten signatures, unique fonts, old typewriter typing sounds, multimedia attachment preview, capturing animations from the web, a flash window indicating time and email status, easy placement of your pictures in emails and on the fly spellchecker. IncrediMail has the ability to read POP mail without downloading it. This way, you can delete unwanted mail directly from the POP3 server.

i.Scribe 1.88

http://www.memecode.com/scribe.php

i.Scribe is a remarkably compact email program with an easy to use interface and some excellent features, including a split view of folders and items, signatures, drag and drop, preview and more. The program does not require an install and can be run from a floppy disk or USB stick, if needed. It allows you to manage email accounts, check your mail periodically, preview mail on the server, color code your messages, and more. i.Scribe can import existing mail from Outlook Express, Netscape, Outlook and Unix MBOX. Additional features include plug-in support, proxy support, ESMTP authentication, message templates, Bayesian spam filter and more. A very capable little email program with a ton of features, great as an alternative to the big guys, or as mobile solution on a USB drive. The best part of this is that it is just 790KB, making it very portable. It’s an open source cross-platform email client, more popular with Operating Systems other than Windows.

Mulberry 4.0.6

http://www.mulberrymail.com/

Mulberry’s biggest feature is scalability. It supports Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. So what does that make it? A high-performance and graphically groovy Internet mail client for all three major platforms. It uses the IMAP protocol for accessing mail messages on a server, the standard SMTP protocol for sending messages and IMSP for remote preferences. The only big problem is its ease of use. To a newbie, it could take some time to configure a new mail account due to its poor interface. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its advantages. There’s the Speak mail feature that uses the installed text-to-speech engine in the OS to read your email to you. The search engine is simple, but powerful. It’s free software, so you can always give it a try.