iScribe description
Small and fast email client that lets you send, receive and manage email without fuss

i.Scribe is a useful email client utility that allows you to send and receive emails.

i.Scribe is a remarkably compact email program with an easy to use interface and many features, including a split view of folders and items, signatures, drag and drop, spell checking as well as an internal address book and calendar.

i.Scribe is a small and fast email client that lets you send, receive and manage email without fuss. The user interface is familiar and easy to use. The major internet protocols for email are supported: POP3, [E]SMTP, MIME, IMAP4 (fetch only), MAPI (fetch, win32) and viewing of HTML mail. Also included is an integrated Contact database and Calendar.

Additional features include plug-in support, proxy support, ESMTP authentication, message templates and more. A very capable little email program with a ton of features. To further extend the functionality, i.Scribe also supports plug-ins. Supports POP3, IMAP and SMTP.

Here are some key features of "iScribe":

· Small
Scribe is quite small, around 500K to download. And even when downloaded takes up very little of your hard disk or memory while running. You can easily use Scribe from a floppy disk. The usually memory footprint is about 3-4 MB with a reasonable sized mail folder loaded. Great for those older machines that don't have gobs of RAM and HD.

· Fast
Startup and shutdown are very quick. Typically taking only a second or two. Mail sends and receives go as fast as your net connection allows. No needless waiting around for things to happen (like Outlook). Because Scribe uses a flexible flat file format for mail storage you can move email with huge attachments around with no effort at all, unlike some email clients that have to copy the entire email, including attachment to another file on disk causing unnecessary waiting for the user.

· Easy
Scribe comes totally self contained. Once you unzip the distribution file scribe is installed. There's no dll's left lying around or registry settings to worry about. All the data and settings for scribe are stored in it's directory. And when you delete that directory you don't have to worry about cleaning up after Scribe.

· Cross-platform
Scribe runs in Windows and Linux. Allowing users to maintain all their email and contacts in one place. Run the version of scribe for the OS your running and access the email received in another OS. There is a legacy BeOS version that may be able to read/write to a Scribe mail folder.

· Free
i.Scribe is free for everyone to use. No time limits, no nagging shareware banners or number of trials. Use it to your hearts content. But for those who want more features and would like to support me in producing this software there is a commercial version, with extra features, called InScribe.

· Up To Date
I've been releasing updates about once a month since the start of 1999. People email bug reports and feature requests in to me and where possible they get incorperated into an update. Releases are tagged "stable" or "unstable" to help you to pick a version suitable for your purposes. The unstable builds are public beta's for experienced users to test.

· Multi-language
Scribe can be translated into any language. Here is some information about translating the user interface text into another language.

· Expandable
Scribe has a plugin interface that allows people to expand the capabilities of the application. If anyone is interested in writing a plugin I can send you the libraries and documentation to do so. So far you can write plugins for 3rd party MIME type viewers, directory services and text handling utilities. In the future Scribe will support plugins for mail source/sink and mail storage. Which will mean that the very core of Scribe will be open to new ways of receiving, sending and storing email.

· Safe
Scribe is not vunerable to email virus' like Klex because the HTML support is not provided by Internet Explorer but by a build in HTML control that has no scripting and no execute capability. The attachment list won't hide the real extension of a file either, which typically used by virus' to trick the user into openning an executable when the user thought it was a document. And if a virus does get in through by some other means, it won't be able to find your address book thus prevently it from mailing itself to all your contacts.

· Interoperable
Scribe supports importing and exporting mail, contacts and calendar events to many open formats such as MBOX, .eml (single email), vCard, vCal/iCal and CSV (comma separated variables) contacts. Also support for proprietry formats and API's such as MAPI (import/export available only on windows), Outlook Express's MBX/DBX format and Eudora's address book is included. Scribe also has native support for converting winmail.dat attachments from Outlook user's into separate attachments that you can open or forward, which works even on Linux!


Limitations:

· Free version is limited to 1 email account and 5 user-defined filters.