The Bat! Professional Edition 11.3

Overview

The Bat! Professional Edition is a robust e-mail client that makes it easy to send, organize, and manage e-mail communications within a centralized interface. With a plethora of powerful features, this edition of the software is recommended for advanced users. Basic users may find The Bat! Home Edition to be more ideal.

Installation

With a file size of about 16 MB, the software takes a few minutes to download, and is very easy to install. It is compatible with Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, 7, and NT 4.

Interface

The user interface is neatly organized into several compartmentalized Windows, and all features can be easily accessed via menus at the top, or self-explanatory button icons. There are eight menus located at the top of the main window – Message, Specials, Folder, Account, Tools, View, Options, and Help. There is also a conveniently located search box in the top taskbar that helps you easily find messages within your e-mail library.

Pros

• Supports POP3 accounts, which allow you to forward e-mails from other addresses

• Allows multithreading, letting you perform multiple functions simultaneously without slowing down the software

• Supports APOP authorization

• Lets you adjust your user interface to display nine different languages – English, German, Russian, Polish, Dutch, Italian, Swedish, Romanian, Lithuanian

• Includes a built-in multilingual spell checker

• Provides automatic dial-up networking capabilities, with individual profiles that can be configured for several accounts

• Offers a number of convenient organizational features, including message coloring, flagging, and filtering

• Compliant with the latest UUencode and MIME encryption standards

• Lets you assign a photograph to every entry in your address book, making it easy to identify various individuals on your contact list

• Provides an ideal interface for message editing

• Makes it easy to manage messages across multiple Web servers/e-mail accounts using forwarding options

• Supports biometric authentication

• Includes a number of integrated emoticons that let you express emotion in your e-mail messages

• Supports token-based hardware authentication to prevent unwanted interception

• Offers on-the-fly encryption on a per message basis

• Is available for commercial usage

Cons

• May take some time to become acquainted with the more advanced features

• Produces sloppy HTML code sometimes. However, this is easy to fix if you are proficient in HTML or have an HTML cleanup application

Alternatives

The most notable alternatives to The Bat! Professional include Evolution (Linux), Thunderbird, Postbox, Windows Live Mail, Sparrow (Mac), Apple Mail (Mac), and of course the resident Microsoft Outlook that is included with Windows. Although all of the aforementioned competitors have similar functionality, many people prefer The Bat! Professional Edition because it provides advanced features that are useful for online entrepreneurs and business owners.

Conclusion

If you're looking for an easy way to manage your ingoing/outgoing e-mails, The Bat! Professional Edition provides a plethora of basic and advanced features, and is therefore ideal for users of all skill levels. Although there are plenty of other e-mail clients to choose from, this amazing tool offers a surprisingly extensive feature set.