Bat flies out of hell, saves Mageek again

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Manufacturer: Ritlabs
Price: $35 (30 days free trial)
Requirements Windows OSes
Web Site THE BAT

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IT'S BEEN A WHILE since we reviewed The Bat email client -- we were still at the Other Plaice when we gave it a whirl. Here.

But we found ourselves in the absurdly weird "W" hotel for an AMD launch a week or two back and discovered that Outlook was having its not irregular "attack of the cloggies". This sometimes happens on mail servers when an email gets stuck in the system and refuses to download. If you can't get hold of your ISP to fix it, old Outlook tries and tries and tries again to download all of the emails it's already downloaded and it's a real pain in the butt.

But we remembered that when this happened to us a few years back The Bat helped us out, because it's got a neat little feature that lets you get at email on the server. So we downloaded the trial version and off we went, finding the culprit and consigning it to the Seventh Hell of unread mail.

That's also useful for detecting 25MB PowerPoint attachments before they catch you when you've used your pathetic little modem somewhere in hotel hell. It also supports 15 languages with interfaces to match.

You're probably too young to remember that Microsoft took over Network Courier back in the 1980s. There's still a fair bit of code from the original in that old one... we reviewed it back in 1987 last. It was, er, sort of, well, sort of... and still is.

The Bat has changed quite a bit since we reviewed it at the Other Plaice but it's still got that feature that lets you climb onto your mail server and go delete, and a fair bit more.

It's pretty lean and mean, and because it doesn't use Mr Windows' address book or HTML viewer, you are protected from all those nasties that can really degrade your machine. It also supports multiple email accounts.

The Bat also supports S/MIME and PGP versions from 2.6X onwards, has pretty good filtering and you can play around with the interface if you don't like. It's got a mail ticker for email notification but this can get annoying, it's switch off time for this baby.

There's also a version of The Bat called Secure Bat, which comes with a little purple dongle that protects your message base, your address books and offers some other tweaks.

Anyroadmap, if you're tired of Outlook clogging up your hard drive and Internet arteries, the Bat still stays good value at $35 (private use), $45 (business use), and $25 (studenten). If you really want it on a CD and in a box, there's also a version at $55. Plus you can try it free for 30 days, to figure out if you want to ditch the Microsoft pitch and try another email client with some super duper features.

Also we decided not to have any Microsoft applications on this new machine, just to see if it is possible to live without the Vole. So kindly send us a registration code after reading this review Ritblat! OK? µ