Scan & Fix 50 registry issues FREECNET Editors' review
Using Mozilla's own code, Postbox rivals Thunderbird for alternative desktop e-mail clients. Or at least, it wants to. Make no mistake, Postbox introduces some innovations that Mozilla could learn from. Much as Songbird changes Firefox's tune for audiophiles, Postbox takes desktop e-mail hard toward Web 2.0, with fast links to upload contacts to Facebook and pictures to Picasa.
Click on an e-mail, and the preview pane not only shows the text, but extracts all links, images, other attachments, and contacts into a Compose Sidebar for easy management. From there, you can upload to Twitter, FriendFeed, MySpace, Delicious, and Google. Postbox is also obsessed with tabs, so that each new mail can open traditionally or in a tab of its own. Searches get their own tabs, too. Postbox will ask you to import e-mail, contacts, and other messaging data from Thunderbird, Outlook, Google, and Yahoo when it starts. Two other innovations are worth highlighting: you can globally extract attachments, links, images, or contacts into a single tab, and there's a remix of Thunderbird's Labels feature. Called Topics, it automatically searches across folders for messages with the same tag. This can't be done without extra effort in Thunderbird.
Postbox gained Thunderbird's extensibility in beta 13, but it's currently limited. There's heavy customization is limited, although Postbox does now have it's own slightly-buggy version of Thunderbird's Lightning calendar plug-in. There's also support for the Provider for Google Calendar plug-in. All the add-on talk may be a major interest for some, or much ado about nothing, but the beta won't be free for much longer: Postbox plans to go premium in the fall of 2009.
Publisher's Description
From Postbox:
Postbox helps you make the most of your email, offering powerful new ways to find, use, and view email messages and content, organize your work life, and get stuff done. 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 is all in the catalog and it's all searchable.
What's new in this version: Version 1.1.1 fixes a crash during migration from Eudora.
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Open, view, and extract data from TNEF-encoded messages.
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All versions:
3.6 starsout of 14 votes
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Current version:
2.0 starsout of 1 votes
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My rating:
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"Disappoints in actual use"
Version: Postbox 1.1.1
Pros
Organise mails by thread.
Some useful features for search when a message is open.Cons
Memory hog!
Slow search.
Downloads email twice when using pop mail with MS Exchange server.Summary
I tried out the software in actual use conditions (i.e., with a lot of email).
In real use, Postbox disappoints:
(1) This is a real memory hog when used with large mailboxes (RAM allocation grows to 250+ megabytes)
(2) The search feature is slow in large mailboxes.
(3) The search feature does not remember the last option used (unlike Thunderbird). I mostly search subject or sender. Postbox does not remember this as default.
(4) And finally, the most important. When used with Microsoft Exchange server in pop mode for offline use with a laptop, Postbox downloads every mail exactly twice. This has to do with Message ID being changed with first download.
When you contact their support to fix this, they are at first helpful, but when they discover that they cannot fix the problem, they simply fade away and no longer respond to your queries.
There are also many other problems, including inability to set defaults for message delete actions (go to the next message below instead of above, as most people read their emails from top down).
In all, I tried and was disappointed. Would not recommend to others. Software is potentially great, but a new entrant really cannot afford to treat users as arrogantly as this.
In addition, the memory problem is real when it should not be.
Like any software using MS Outlook style file format, this too creates excessively large mailbox files and does not offer the option to automatically detach attachments from messages and store them in a separate folder.
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