Today I want to plug my (current) favorite email client. If you’re looking
for an alternative to Outlook for POP3 or IMAP4 email, you could do much worse
than The Bat!,
which I’ve been using for several years now. The Bat! is fast, intuitive,
multi-threaded, includes its own html viewer, handles any number of email accounts,
and, most importantly of all, it doesn’t execute your email.

Last week I spent time with my 70+ year-old aunt, helping her get set up with
The Bat!. She’d been using Outlook Express and had been hit with some
sort of worm or virus that spread by email. The bad payload arrived, Outlook
happily executed it, and next thing you know my poor aunt was faced with the
aggravating task of wiping her hard-drive, reinstalling Windows, and, well you
probably know the routine. Actually, I think it was a cousin who got stuck with
the reinstall job. It fell to me to get her email up and running again. To prevent
a recurrance of the whole affair, I convinced my aunt to buy a copy of The
Bat!.

In all the many years that I’ve been using The Bat!, and before that
the Agent Newsreader/Mail
client, I’ve never been troubled by malicious email. From at least as early
as 1997, and onwards, I’ve never had been adversely affected by an email I’ve
read using The Bat! or Agent. I regularly receive suspicious-looking
email, usually html email, that I believe would be disasterous if opened in
Outlook, but because I don’t use Outlook, such email passes harmlessly through
my inbox and into my trash folder. I’ve seen email virus alerts come and go,
watched the consternation of corporate email administrators as they frantically
sent out emails to warn users not to even read other emails, and I’ve always
been able to blissfully ignore the storms.

A year and a half ago, my wife’s computer got hit with what we now refer to
in our family as the funchina email. This was a malicious email that
set Internet Explorer’s home page to funchina.com, opened up a number
of porn sites, put some sort of sexual reference into the Internet Explorer
title bar, and I’m not sure what all else it did. Even deleting the email was
a bit of a problem, because every time she clicked on it to delete it, Outlook
would begin opening web pages. In the end, the only way I could get rid of all
traces of that email was to reformat my wife’s disk, reinstall Windows, and
then reinstall all her applications. I gave her my old copy of the Agent Newsreader/Mail
client, and she’s not had a lick of trouble since.

Could it be that one of the best ways to avoid attacksy by malicious software
is to simply use any email client other than Outlook? I believe that’s the case.
My wife and I run Norton Antivirus on all our PCs. In a Windows environment,
antivirus software seems to be one of the keys to maintain secure and stable
systems. However, equally as important, in my opinion, is our decision to use
non-Outlook solutions for all our email needs. Did I say "if you’re looking
for an alternative to Outlook" earlier? There’s no "if" about
it. My aunt’s and my wife’s experiences speak for themselves. You should be
looking.