January 1998's Featured Freeware

This month's featured freeware is an undeservingly obscure e-mail client called FoxMail. I know, there's an e-mail service by the same name, but they are totally unrelated. The FoxMail e-mail client is free; the Foxmail e-mail service is not. But there are certainly more differences between the two than that.

For those of you who don't know what an e-mail client is, it is a program that allows you to send and receive e-mail, or more appropriately, send and receive mail through your mail server, but that's more technical than you probably want to get into. Well, FoxMail does just that and more, much more.

FoxMail has the following features (from the Help file):

Fast in sending/receiving/decoding messages.
Remote mailbox management; can delete messages on the server before downloading.
Local mailbox encryption.
16-bit, but if run under Windows 95 FoxMail has a Windows 95 'look.'
A preview window to browse message contents easily.
Address book supporting many information items.
Attach any size file to your messages.
Customized message label with color.
MIME and UUEncode compatibility.
Retrieving mails from Multiple POP3 accounts.
Mailbox Assistance, automatically dispatches the incoming messages to different boxes according to the user-defined rules.
Browse HTML-formatted mail with your own web browser.
Available in both English and Chinese versions.

The amazing thing about all this is that the FoxMail download is under 300 KB's! I know the most recent version of Pegasus Mail is nearly 2 MB's, and Eudora 'Light' is much larger, not to mention Pronto Mail. Come on people, do we really need to have bloated browsers and bloated e-mail clients? I don't think so, and I've refused to even download any of these freeware e-mail clients. Unfortunately, I've really needed an e-mail client.

Okay, I've been using an SMTP mailer and hotmail to retrieve my mail. I've also been using Netscape 3.04, but since Netscape's not my primary browser (Opera is, by the way, because it's so much faster) and it loads slow even on my tweaked-out Pentium, I don't like to use it exclusively for e-mail.

So I've got this problem. The SMTP mailer is nice, but that's what it is - an SMTP mailer. And hotmail is way to slow on a modem connection. And like I said, Netscape loads too slow to be using it just for e-mail. And I absolutely hate bloatware.

So the search for a light, but functional e-mail client, begins. And I run across the advanced, but buggy, E-Mail Thing 2. But I eventually rip it off my hard drive because it is so buggy. I've used Pine before, and there's a version for Win32, but it doesn't work with AOHell. Heck, I've even used Postie, a nice command line e-mailer, but I'm way to used to graphical interfaces. Then, after seemingly years of endless searching for the One True E-Mail Client, I coincidently run into FoxMail.

So it's a 16-bit program. But it has a Windows 95-like interface, at least when you run it in Windows 95 (I think it has to do with the respective version of CTL3D*.DLL). And I need the 16-bit winsock for Windows NT because AOHell95 doesn't work with NT. But most importantly, it's fully featured and easily configured, especially for multiple-users. Well, that is, of course, in my humble opinion.

It also doesn't try to put a bunch of crap in my Windows or Windows slash System directory that I already have there. There is no setup program, by the way, but the program itself is easy to setup as I said. You can put it anywhere you like, and it will store all your mail in a subfolder and your configuration file in the same folder. It doesn't make any registry entries, at least as far as I can tell, which makes it easy to install and uninstall (if you have to).

This proggie is fast, very configurable, of course, and is updated constantly. Unfortunately, I don't believe the author has a home page yet, but if you e-mail him he'll keep you updated on new releases of the program.

Check out a screen shot (25.9 KB) or download it (http, English version).

Note that there may be a more recent version - if the link is no longer valid, then go to its directory - it should have a name like fmail*.zip).

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