IncrediMail Xe 5.80 - Free Email Program

Pros

• IncrediMail is a friendly program, easy and a lot of fun to use
• Plenty of stationery and multimedia content is available for IncrediMail
• IncrediMail offers two simple yet effective spam protection options and protects your privacy

Cons

• IncrediMail supports IMAP accounts in a very limited and rudimentary way
• Secure, encrypted email messaging is not available in IncrediMail
• IncrediMail's internal spam filter is not ideal for lots of mail, the subscription could catch more

Description

• IncrediMail manages POP, IMAP (download-only) and MSN Hotmail Plus email accounts with full international language support.
• Large collections of stationery, animations, emoticons and sounds to be used in IncrediMail emails.
• IncrediMail sports animated new mail notifiers, 3D effects and animations throughout the program.
• Filters, a search engine and message flags help you organize emails in IncrediMail.
• With the IncrediMail junk mail filter, only mail from approved senders enters your inbox.
• IncrediMail JunkFilter Plus, a subscription service, identifies and filters spam automatically.
• IncrediMail can block remote images in emails (problematic privacy-wise) and lets you bounce mail.
• It is easy and safe to transfer all IncrediMail data and settings to a new computer.
• Anonymous usage data collected by IncrediMail identifies the most popular letters and other content.
• IncrediMail supports Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000/3/XP/Vista.

Guide Review - IncrediMail Xe 5.80 - Free Email Program

If you've always thought that email was useful and boring (well, mostly boring), IncrediMail can show you the other side of email: animated cartoons announce incoming mail and when you open it, a letter unfolds. Your reply can be based on fun, rich and often beautiful stationery to which you can add animations and sounds.

IncrediMail supports multiple POP accounts and allows you to access Hotmail, AOL or IMAP accounts too. A nice address book lets you collect contacts in IncrediMail, simple filters can sort your mail and you can search quite efficiently.

If you receive lots of email and want to manage it efficiently, IncrediMail's bells and whistles can be a bit distracting, though. The IMAP support in IncrediMail is also lacking and lets you only download mail, not access it on the server.

For this group of users, who get lots of spam and lots of mail from strangers, the junk mail filter built into IncrediMail is not sufficient either. But if you usually communicate with the same people, the simple whitelist-based spam filter works quite nicely and effectively, moving mail from unapproved senders to a special folder.

As a potent alternative, IncrediMail offers a subscription service called JunkFilter Plus that eliminates spam with very little interference or worry but could catch a bit more of it. In a nice move, IncrediMail also blocks remote images to protect your privacy. Now easy and fun support for encrypted email and message signing would be great.