For some time, I have found it annoying to have to open Outlook Express to read my e-mail. Similarly, the consultation of the messages from my free AOL-mailboxes could also be described as tedious. To make maters worse, my ISP has a laborious procedure imposed by my provider for consulting my messages when I’m abroad.

So, to make my life easier and to this end the pain, I tried three freeware programs: Popman, Koma-mail and Pop Peeper.

POPMAN is a POP3 and IMAP4 manager and weighs 4.32 MB in its portable version. IMAP supports allows you to access AOL, AIM, Fastmail, and other services.

KOMA-MAIL is a portable e-mail client of 7.23 MB that supports the protocols IMAP/POP3/SMTP and WebDav (Hotmail), SSL, and APOP.

POP PEEPER (4.43 MB) is an e-mail notifier that alerts you when you have new email on your POP3, IMAP (with IDLE support), Hotmail/MSN/Live e-mail, Yahoo, GMail, MyWay, Excite, iWon, Lycos.com, RediffMail, Juno, and NetZero accounts.

All these programs can be installed on your PC and/or on a USB stick, such as when you want to use them on a PC you don’t own.

These software offer you features that are missing in many typical e-mail clients:

• List e-mails waiting on your server
• Easily delete unwanted e-mails
• Check e-mail accounts in the background
• Secure viewing of e-mail messages
• Convenient desktop notifications of new e-mails

I guess each one has its own fans, but which one does a novice (like me) prefer? To find out which one I like the most, first I tested my e-mail accounts on them. For neither software was it too difficult to configure my four e-mail accounts and they all accessed my messages without problems.

Secondly I looked at other aspects of the software. I discovered PopMan is… the man… when it comes to security.
Because the messages in PopMan are displayed in plain text, there is no threat of executing dangerous code or being infected with viruses. It should be noted, however, that – unlike the other two software – with PopMan you cannot reply to e-mails.

Because I consider the messages of my correspondents as safe (and I would like to be able to view e-mails “normally” in HTML and open attachements), and that I would like to be able to reply to e-mails, I eliminated PopMan from selection, leaving me to pick between Pop Peeper and Koma-Mail. In the end the convenience and speed of Pop Peeper won me over.

If anyone has any suggestions about any better e-mail software, feel free to share in the comments below.

PopMan

Homepage: http://www.ch-software.de/popman/

Download link: http://www.ch-software.de/popman/download/PopMan.exe (installer) http://www.ch-software.de/popman/download/PopMan.zip (portable)

Koma-mail

Homepage: http://www.koma-code.de/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5&Itemid=39

Download link: http://koma-code.de/ProgsZip/KomaMail_Installer.zip (installer) http://koma-code.de/ProgsZip/KomaMail.zip (portable)

Pop Peeper

Homepage: http://www.poppeeper.com/

Download page: http://www.poppeeper.com/download.php

This is a Community Content article. It has been contributed to dotTech by Jeanjean. Contribute your own article to dotTech by clicking here.