World's simplest, LIGHTEST email client?

Question

I do not want the bloat that is outlook, nor do I need exchange server-like nifty features. Most certainly do not want the bloat that is thunderbird.

I just want to be able to send and receive email as/with the particular email account I set up on my domain.

Pocomail sounded like a nice idea but apparently it does not deal with html and since this is for a tiny fledgling biz, i think I might need to accomodate html... so I didn't investigate further.

Too bad gmail won't let me send from my own mail server, really. :o) What do you guys use that simple and nifty?

===edit===

forgot to mention this is going to be on Windows Vista. (Hey, I'm not a "superuser", okay? I got bounced from stackoverflow :-) )

Answer 1

i'm quite impressed by Koma-Mail which has replaced Thunderbird for my POP3 and IMAP needs.

Koma-Mail is an email client which is comfortable and has very handy functions. It does not need an installation, so that you can run Koma-Mail from your flash drive but, of course, also on your desktop.

For safety reasons Koma-Mail blocks scripts and ActiveX in your mails. You can also encrypt your user account. To be protected against webbugs you can use Koma-Mail in the offline mode.

Koma-Mail offers two different spam filters: one is word based and the other one is a Bayesian. To prevent false negative detections Koma-Mail uses a white list.

With Koma-Mail you can send and receive mails, encrypted via SSL, through POP3, IMAP (including synchronization), SMTP and WebDav. To stay informed you can use the integrated RSS viewer.

Koma-Mail is freeware.

As for the footprint: Koma-Mail requires less than 7 MB disk space (without mails, that is) and is using around 14 MB RAM.

Answer 2

Pine® - a Program for Internet News & Email - is a tool for reading, sending, and managing electronic messages.

Pine can be downloaded free.

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Edit by ldigas: Pine however is no longer under active development. Alpine project has succeded it.

Answer 3

GMail will allow you to send email forwarded from your local MTA provided that you connect using TLS.

Answer 4

You can also open a free web apps account with google, simply change your mx record on your site to point to google servers and let google handle all of your mail and web apps needs for your domain. You can have up to 50 email addresses using this service which is usually more than many web hosts allow. Go to http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html to get started. Don't worry, they walk you through every step.

Answer 5

Mutt is a free open-source simple lightweight mail client. It supports hooking up to a remote POP3, IMAP, and SMTP server (however you must find the documentation)

Answer 6

While I wouldn't suggest that you actually use it for this purpose, the world's smallest and lightest email client is called telnet. And yes, I have used it as an email client on more than one occasion. The big drawback is that telnet saves nothing on your local machine and you need to know the POP3 and IMAP and SMTP protocols fairly well in order to use it. All the code that is found in a normal email client executes in your head, and telnet just serves as a means for sending strings back and forth from the mail server.

Answer 7

I've used i.Scribe (the free version; there's a for-pay version called InScribe available as well) for years with great success. There're versions available for Windows, OS X, and Linux.

http://memecode.com/scribe.php

Answer 8

I use Eudora at home. It has several modes, some of which are free. See http://www.eudora.com/download/ The major benefit to me is that the downloaded eMail is in the native text which allows me to read the mail using any text display. I use this capability to find and defeat some of the worst spam offenders.

Answer 9

I have to say that Windows Mail is not half-bad, having previously experienced the bloat of Thunderbird and its IMAP issues.