Please suggest compact, lightweight email client

[rjbull]

I use The Bat! Pro on my main laptop, but now have a budget ultraportable (Xidu Tour Pro) as a back-up.  It only has a 128Gb SSD (though it has a slot for a second one, which I haven't looked into).  I'm looking for a compact, lightweight email client for it.  A quick search turns up TheBat! as "lightweight", but recent versions have jumped from about a 40Mb download to 120Mb.  I could use The Bat! Voyager on a USB stick as the Pro license covers this, but I'm wondering if there are other recommendations.  I briefly tried i.Scribe / InScribe and didn't get on very well with it, but might take another look.  Otherwise, the commonest suggestions seem to all be ports from Unix/Linux:

• Alpine
• Sylpheed
• Claws Mail (a fork of Sylpheed)

Is there anything else I should consider, please?

[nogojoe]

I use The Bat! Pro on my main laptop, but now have a budget ultraportable (Xidu Tour Pro) as a back-up.  It only has a 128Gb SSD (though it has a slot for a second one, which I haven't looked into).  I'm looking for a compact, lightweight email client for it.  A quick search turns up TheBat! as "lightweight", but recent versions have jumped from about a 40Mb download to 120Mb.  I could use The Bat! Voyager on a USB stick as the Pro license covers this, but I'm wondering if there are other recommendations.  I briefly tried i.Scribe / InScribe and didn't get on very well with it, but might take another look.  Otherwise, the commonest suggestions seem to all be ports from Unix/Linux:

• Alpine
• Sylpheed
• Claws Mail (a fork of Sylpheed)

Is there anything else I should consider, please?

-rjbull (January 15, 2022, 03:19 PM)

Pegasus Mail   only 12mb

[Contro]

I use thunderbid portable or not.
In the past I use other client emails. Specially because I have a lot of accounts to control...
 

[Tuxman]

+1 for Pegasus Mail. Note that the developer has been working on the 5th major version for quite a while now, version 4.x is not quite contemporary in look&feel*. (Which is OK for me, but less OK for other people - especially as you come from The Bat!.)

I, personally, also own and primarily use a license for Pandora Mail which I - incidentally - first saw on DonationCoder. It has replaced The Bat! for me when RITlabs decided to use ribbon toolbars which I don't want to use. Pandora Mail 4.1 uses roughly 53 megabytes (plus the profile folder which can not completely be moved off %APPDATA% as far as I can see) of disk space, it seems to not have a portable mode (yet?). Of course, you should be fine with 90s GUI design... (you can configure some of that.)

(* screenshot: Pegasus Mail 4.7 on Windows 11)

If you like Alpine (which is good software, I admit), other interesting command line clients for Windows include NeoMutt and a few others, but note that usual "ported to Windows" software mostly requires jumping through quite a few hoops to use the file system over Cygwin...

[rjbull]

+1 for Pegasus Mail. Note that the developer has been working on the 5th major version for quite a while now, version 4.x is not quite contemporary in look&feel*. (Which is OK for me, but less OK for other people - especially as you come from The Bat!.)

-Tuxman (January 23, 2022, 10:22 PM)

I dabbled with Pegasus long ago.  I much prefer The Bat!'s permanently-visible tree of accounts, but the thing I hated about Pegasus was its default of deleting all mail on the server.  It felt like a deliberate attempt to lock you in.  Still, forewarned is forearmed.

I, personally, also own and primarily use a license for Pandora Mail which I - incidentally - first saw on DonationCoder.
[...]
Pandora Mail 4.1 uses roughly 53 megabytes (plus the profile folder which can not completely be moved off %APPDATA% as far as I can see) of disk space, it seems to not have a portable mode (yet?). Of course, you should be fine with 90s GUI design... (you can configure some of that.)

-Tuxman (January 23, 2022, 10:22 PM)

I briefly tried Pandora when I saw your earlier post, and couldn't make head nor tail of it!  Software doesn't usually leave me baffled (though a trial disk of DOS AskSam did).  But, I spent the 90s (and after) determinedly clinging on to DOS software, and I don't think it was until 1998 or so that changes at work meant I finally had to come to terms with WinGUI.  Maybe I missed out on that era.

It has replaced The Bat! for me when RITlabs decided to use ribbon toolbars which I don't want to use.

-Tuxman (January 23, 2022, 10:22 PM)

Nor do I.  I'm still using The Bat! 9.1.18.  Perhaps the new UI is responsible for some of the recent bloat:


thebat_64_9-1-18.msi                              42,135,552   
thebat_64_9-4-5.msi                              143,663,104   

If you like Alpine (which is good software, I admit), other interesting command line clients for Windows include NeoMutt and a few others, but note that usual "ported to Windows" software mostly requires jumping through quite a few hoops to use the file system over Cygwin...

-Tuxman (January 23, 2022, 10:22 PM)

Ouch.  That could be a disincentive 

[Cloq]

Seems The Bat has integrated some Chromium libraries.. probably explains the massive bloat.

https://www.ritlabs....vision-history/7405/
HTML rendering engine is set to solely Chromium (CEF library v83.3)

[Tuxman]

That does, at least, solve some of the past problems with HTML e-mail in The Bat!.

(Not that HTML e-mail was a good idea at all...)