One of the more useful functions of any email client is the ability to search your sent and received items to quickly find information on any correspondence. While just about every email client implements this feature, the speed of your searches can vary drastically.

One email client which focuses on search speed and depth is Postbox.

Postbox works behind the scenes to catalog everything in your email. We mean everything: every bit of text, every contact, address and link. Every picture, document and attachment. It’s all in the catalog and it’s all searchable.

Needless to say, if you deal with a lot of email volume this is certainly appealing. Postbox has quite a feature list, so if you are looking for another email client this might be worth a look.

Pretty much all email clients have some sort of new mail notification. Be it a sound, pop-up, tray icon or whatever, the purpose of it is to grab your attention. While this is certainly convenient, it also can be quite distracting… especially if you have a lot of spam getting through.

Before we swapped our email to run through Postini, I would get roughly 50 spam messages a day. While Outlook’s built in filters and SpamBayes would filter 95% of it, the new email would still trigger the notification. If you figure each distraction costs about 30 seconds to get your initial train of thought back, this is approximately a 30 minute time waster each day which prompted me to disable the notification.

Keep in mind, your new email notification’s usefulness is directly proportional to the effectiveness of your spam filter. Since Postini has virtually eliminated our spam, my new mail notifications are now working exactly as they were intended.

If you prefer using a mail client on your local computer as opposed to accessing your email via a web interface and are looking for a portable solution, you might want to take a look at i.Scribe.

Scribe is a small and fast email client with an intergrated contact database and calendar. It supports all the major internet mail protocols and uses international standards where possible. Scribe doesn’t required installing or uninstalled and can be used from a removable drive without reconfiguration. It comes with a bayesian spam filter and translations to many different languages. Updates are published regularly to respond to problems and to add features. Because Scribe runs on Windows and Linux you can take your mail with you when you change operating system.

Note the big feature here: portability. You can copy i.Scribe to a flash drive and take the program with you and run it from any Windows or Linux machine with access to all your mail, calendar, contacts and account settings.

There are lots of other features available as well such as the bayesian (i.e. learning) spam filter which make this a really great alternative. You get all the power of a desktop application with all the portability of web mail which makes this an awesome combination.