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GeminiSoft Pimmy

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allen:
Historically, Pimmy has been an incredibly small mail client designed with portability in mind.  Drop the program's folder on a floppy disk or, in this day and age, USB flash drive and you're ready to go.  As of this morning, Pimmy is officially version 4.0 -- and packing quite a wallop for its mere 750k!

I've always felt the need to try nearly every mail client to be released, even when completely happy with the one I'm using, so I've tried quite a few.  I've used more powerful clients than Pimmy . . . and I've used smaller clients than Pimmy -- but I have never used something that was this small and powerful.

Pimmy is happily suited to handling multiple e-mail accounts and streamlines this with filtering capabilities more powerful than most "full" mail clients I've used (not all mind you, most), can be used for reading/replying to newsgroups, and fetches RSS feeds.  Aside from these bigger things, they haven't missed the details either -- little things are present, like the ability to configure multiple sender profiles with unique reply to info and signatures; a plethora of keyboard shortcuts for common tasks and even the ability to rot13 or password encode blocks of text in the composer.


The way you organize things in Pimmy is a bit different from the traditional approach, and I think it works really well.  It's a tabbed interface, not a true MDI -- switching tabs swaps your entire view. 



Create a tab for your RSS feeds, another for your newsgroups, another still for your work mail and one for your personal mail.



Pimmy 4.0 isn't free, as previous versions of Pimmy were -- a license will cost you twenty USD but I have no qualms with that.  Pimmy has always been a remarkable application and unrivaled for a portable mail client.  This release raises the bar further, making Pimmy 4.0 capable of accommodating full-time, rather than just on the go, use.  The caveat there, is with a large mail base (thousands of messages) she can get a little slow if you're selectively viewing messages ( ctrl+g to filter messages by text/subject, ctrl+h to filter by read/unread).  In this day and age of gmail, I find myself not needing a larger more resource intensive mail client as I once did.  I use Pimmy for the every day downloading/reading and leave my archiving to gmail. Which brings to light another caveat--Pimmy doesn't natively support SSL, but they do have a nice quick guide to using "Stunnel" to connect to SSL servers.

Bottom line, Pimmy is an excellent choice for on-the-go users or users who need something small but effective for home and on the go.  It's not a great choice for e-mail pack rats who like to keep all their mail in the same place over the years, it's just not geared to handle that kind of bulk.

You can...
 View What's New in Pimmy 4.0
View the Full Feature set
Download Pimmy

mouser:
wow the mini-review section is really starting to get great!
great post allen  :Thmbsup:

pimmy looks cool.  feature list from web page:

* Pimmy follows you on your floppy or USB pendrive, it's only 750 KBytes
* Manages your mail on  POP3 and IMAP4 mailboxes
* Manages your  newsgroups with a tree view 
* Keeps yourself informed with  RSS and ATOM channels
* Downloads contemporaneously  from all servers 
* Deletes spamming andvirus without downloading messages
* Works online and offline  much better with the new cache 
* Filters e-mails, newsgroup messages and RSS channels 
* Opens one folder with 10,000 messages in 2 seconds 
* Easily finds unread messages either online and offline 
* Imports messages from Outlook Express and Thunderbird
* Manages your playlists with the built-in MP3 and video mini player

allen:
I can't believe I forgot to mention the mp3 player, that's a big perk to having it on your USB drive! Carry a couple mp3's with you and play them while you check your e-mail.

rjbull:
Allen,

Given your other DC thread on Downloading your Gmail account, what strategy are you using now?  Using Pimmy as you main email client, despite its slowing down with big message bases?

Have you looked at things like Fookes Software's Mailbag Assistant or the ForKeeps Message Archiver for long-term message storage?  (I haven't, just wondering)

allen:
I use Pimmy to read most of my mail.  I do not, however, use it for my gmail archival -- as it really couldn't handle a mailbase of that size sufficiently enough.  In order to prevent a conflict with Pimmy downloading mail and my backup not downloading, I have a copy of all messages forwarded to a third-party account from which I download the messages for reading at the moment.  Erstwhil I use The Bat! to download/maintain the actual backup of my mail.  From there, the mailbase is backed up weekly and uploaded to my ftp account by BatchFTP.

I had used mailbag assistant in the past -- once upon a time, I was in an experimental phase obsessed with e-mail clients.  Using them all, searching for the perfect one -- mailbag assistant played a critical role in my ability to move the mailbase around from client to client  since it natively supports most formats.  (All but Opera, really).  I've since lost my registration, however, and don't have enough need for it right now to warrant the price.  Maybe with a 50% discount . . . :)

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