Free email client with bells & whistles (IncrediMail)

Member Name: Skybly

Product:	IncrediMail
Date:	25/05/01 (5173 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: adds a nice personal touch to your email communications, very easy to use, free

Disadvantages: not everyone can see the "enhanced" messages, lack of advanced functions, advertising link at the bottom of each mail

Incredimail is a free email client for Windows that promises to "send email like in the movies".

What this actually means is that Incredimail makes it very easy to send multimedia emails - decorated with colourful stationery designs, animations and sound.
Furthermore, the email client itself has a very pretty and easy-to-use interface and cute "notifiers" that will pop up on your screen when you receive a new mail.

Let's have a closer look:

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THE INTERFACE

If you have ever used Outlook Express, the interface of Incredimail will look very familiar to you, if a bit more polished:

At the left side of the screen you will see a list of folders (defaults are inbox, outbox, sent items, deleted items and drafts, but you are free to add your own folders to bring a little order into your mails).

The content of the currently selected folder is displayed in a box to the right - a list of the emails sortable by sender, subject or date.

Below this you will find the preview pane in which the currently selected email is previewed. You can turn this feature off if you wish.

Finally, in the lower left corner you will find a little list of "key contacts", contacts from your address book that you frequently write to and want to have quick access to. This feature can also be turned off.

A nice little extra is the clock displayed in the top right corner of the program. This is also where the number of new messages will be displayed, or any error messages should there be a problem connecting to your email server.

At the top of the screen you will find the obligatory menu and toolbar. In comparison to other popular email clients there are only very few menu entries. This is great for newbies as it makes Incredimail a lot more simple and less confusing to use, but more experienced users might be disappointed by the lack
of functions.

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CONFIGURATION

When you run Incredimail for the first time, you will be guided through creating an account. The procedure is quick and painless, requiring you to enter your name, email address, incoming and outgoing email servers (POP3 and SMTP - this information should be provided by your email service) and finally user name and password. You will also be asked for your age, sex and country, but this information is only collected for user statistics.

If more than one person wants to use Incredimail on the same PC (for example, your whole family), you can also have multiple, password-protected accounts.

Should you have used another email client before, you can import your old messages (and address book) from MS Outlook 97/2000, Outlook Express, Microsoft Exchange, Netscape Messenger, Qualcomm Eudora or Windows Messaging.

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SENDING EMAILS

Now, this is probably the most interesting part since this is what really makes Incredimail stand out from other programs: The nice email layouts.

When you compose a new email, a "style box" with four register tabs labelled "Letters", "Animations", "Sounds" and "Ecards" is attached to the window in which you type your message.
In it, the elements that you can add to your mails are sorted into different categories (animals, flowers, holidays etc.) and can be browsed and applied to your message with a click. Should you prefer sending a message without any "decorum", just select the "plain" option in the style box.

The first time you start up Incredimail you won't find too many available letters, animations and sounds in the style box.
But don't despair - there is a huge selection available at the Incredimail website, in a section called "The Gallery".
Here you ca
n browse the content by category and preview all elements. If you decide to download something, all you have to do is click on the download link and the element will automatically be importet into Incredimail. New content is released on a daily basis.

The elements you can add to your emails in detail:

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o Letters
Letters are a great feature of Incredimail. Maybe you have used an email client or webmailer that offered "stationery" before - a choice of background image for your emails.

Incredimail takes this idea a bit further and adjusts your background image, font, text colour and images contained in the message according to the design you select.
For example if you apply the "Celtic Dragon" design to your message, the background picture will change into a light blue spiral pattern, the text will be displayed in a dark blue celtic-style font and there will be a dragon illustration inserted into the text.

The selection of designs is huge and anybody should be able to find a number of letter styles that appeal to them. A few examples of categories include: art, cats, butterflies, the zodiac, sports, flowers, old papers, children, native art, hi tech, beaches, etc.

The majority of designs is of high quality and they really make emails look more interesting.

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o Animations
You can add a little animation to your email if you wish - a bouncing rabbit, a pulsating heart or a flying pig are just 3 examples out of a large range of animations available from incredimail.com . If you don't find anything suitable, you can import animated gif files.
The animations can add a fun touch to your mails, it annoyed me slightly though that they always appear in a fixed place at the bottom right corner.

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o Sounds
If you add a sound, a speaker symbol is
inserted into the message and your sound of choice will be played when the recipient clicks on it. Additionally to the sounds provided by Incredimail, which include animal voices, short phrases and effects, you can import your own sound files in .wav format. Like animations, the speaker symbol is always placed at the bottom right corner of your message.

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o Ecards
Ecards are very similar in concept to letter styles - they change the font, colour and images contained in your message. The difference is that Ecards usually focus on one image that contains a phrase like "Happy Birthday", "Get Well Soon", "Have A Nice Day" etc., depending on the occasion. That way, they look a bit more like postcards than like stationery.

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Of course, independent on which design you select, you can always format the text manually and change the font and colour or make it bold, italic etc.

There are a few little features that add a nice touch to sending emails with Incredimail:

o You can have your message spellchecked in two ways:
either the program will just check all the words one by one and make a suggestion where it thinks you misspelled something, or you can have an "instant spellcheck" like in Microsoft Word where misspelled words will be highlighted as you type.

o You can draw your "handwritten" signature and add it to your messages with the click of a button. Looks nice, it is quite a challenge to make a decent looking signature using the mouse though. You can always scan in your signature as a monochrome gif file though and replace the signature file created by Incredimail with that :)

o While you are typing, you will hear typewriter sounds. Some people might consider this annoying - if you are one of them, don't worry, you can turn this off in the options (like most of
the other "extras".

o When you are done writing and click on send, you will see an animation of your mail being folded into a paper airplane and sent off :)

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RECEIVING EMAILS

Not only sending emails with Incredimail is fun, receiving them is too!

You can minimize Incredimail to a symbol in your system tray and let it check your account for new messages regularly (you can select the amount of time between checks, 5 minutes by default).

Now, if there is new mail on the server, the system tray symbol will change from an empty envelope into one with a letter sticking out, and - and this is the fun part - a "notifier" will pop up on your screen and signal you with sound and animation that you have new mail.

There is a large range of notifiers available, with new ones being added over time. I currently have a duck waddle across my screen and quack at me whenever I have a new email. Other popular notifiers are various animals (cats, dogs, sheep...), a butler, a mailbox, an anime girl, a message in a bottle, and many others.

Most of the notifiers are original and nicely animated and it is always nice to see them pop up on the screen :)

Again, Incredimail has added some nice touches to handling mails,
when you doubleclick on a message to read it it is actually "opened" and pulled from an envelope in a 3D animation, and if you decide to delete it, you can see it being torn to pieces or put through a shredder.

If you receive a lot of emails each day you might want to automatically let Incredimail filter them for you. This can be done with the menu option called "Message Rules".
So, you can have emails from your friends moved into a folder, business mails moved into another folder, and spam mail can be automatically deleted.

The filtering isn't too hard to configure and offers enough options
for the average user.

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SO WHAT'S WRONG WITH IT?

Incredimail has received raging reviews in the press and also here on Dooyoo, and I agree that it is a great program. There are a few downsides though and I feel they should be mentioned.


o Compatibility

The technique that Incredimail uses to create and display its fancy letter styles is nothing else but good old HTML - the same markup language used to format text and display images on the world wide web.
The problem is that what you see isn't always what your recipient will get - they _might_ see the mail as it is supposed to be, but they also might only see the text, or see the text and the pictures completey in the wrong places.

Not all email programs will display HTML mails properly, and even less webmail sites. It should work fine if the recipient uses a program such as Outlook Express or Netscape Messenger, but if they read their mail online at Yahoo! for example, they will at best see the font you selected - provided they have it installed on their computer too!

So, sending "fancy" emails works best if the recipient uses either Incredimail also or one of the leading email clients - with webmail it really depends on the site.
I think this is probably the largest disadvantage of Incredimail, because in most cases I either have no clue what method my friends use to read their emails or they use a method that doesn't support HTML :(

Also, Incredimail's "fancy" messages are - because of the images - somewhat larger than ordinary mails and as such slower to send and receive. I haven't seen any files that were extremely huge though and it doesn't seem to make any difference on today's connections.


o Advertisements

Incredimail is freeware, but you have to pay a price for it:
every email that you send will be branded with
a link to the Incredimail website at the bottom.

The link is rather subtle and not extremely annoying, but if you want to write business mails, for example, it might look somewhat "unprofessional" to have ads attached to your message.

There is a way to turn them off: you can pay 29.95 US-$ (about 20 pounds methinks?), which will get rid of the link and give you free updates for a year, "VIP Support" (whatever that means), and some additional letter styles and notifiers.

Is it worth getting the "Premium Version"? I don't really think so,
because chances are that if the advertisements annoy you for "professional" reasons, you might want to get a more professional email client than Incredimail anyways.


o Lack of advanced funtions

Incredimail is a great program for private use, but if you plan to use it professionally or are an advanced user you might miss some functions.
There is no way to search your emails, for example, or to request confirmation receipts, or add digital signatures, or set up mailing lists, etc.


o Stability

This can be a bit hard to judge since a program that works wonderfully on one computer might crash constantly on another one - too many outside factors play a role in this.
Still, I can say that Incredimail did crash on me a few times so far, one time while I was writing an email - erk. Do yourself a favour and save your work regularly when you are typing a longer message.

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CONCLUSION

Incredimail is a great and easy to use program for newbies, children, and everyone who (like me) enjoys a "personal touch" to their software. If you use email to keep in touch with friends and family you will no doubt enjoy the many possibilites of enhancing your messages with letter styles, animations and sound (an
d then can only hope your recipient is able to see your masterpiece).

However, if you need a program that is able to perform advanced functions (such as handle mailing lists) or want to use it professionally, you will probably find that Incredimail isn't suitable for you. You'll be happier with an advanced piece of software such as the excellent The Bat!.

If you are still curious, I recommend you visit www.incredimail.com and have a look at the demo tour :) Have fun :)

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