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Author Topic: Please suggest compact, lightweight email client  (Read 2872 times)

rjbull

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Please suggest compact, lightweight email client
« on: January 15, 2022, 03:19 PM »
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:


Is there anything else I should consider, please?

nogojoe

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Re: Please suggest compact, lightweight email client
« Reply #1 on: January 15, 2022, 09:37 PM »
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:


Is there anything else I should consider, please?
Pegasus Mail   only 12mb
Often the most convincing people are those who have lost the plot so much they don't recognize the difference between fact and fantasy

Contro

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Re: Please suggest compact, lightweight email client
« Reply #2 on: January 23, 2022, 05:32 AM »
I use thunderbid portable or not.
In the past I use other client emails. Specially because I have a lot of accounts to control...
 :-* :P

Tuxman

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Re: Please suggest compact, lightweight email client
« Reply #3 on: January 23, 2022, 10:22 PM »
+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... :)
« Last Edit: January 23, 2022, 10:29 PM by Tuxman »

rjbull

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Re: Please suggest compact, lightweight email client
« Reply #4 on: January 24, 2022, 03:57 PM »
+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 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.) :)

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.

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... :)

Ouch.  That could be a disincentive  :(

Cloq

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Re: Please suggest compact, lightweight email client
« Reply #5 on: January 30, 2022, 01:30 PM »
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

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Re: Please suggest compact, lightweight email client
« Reply #6 on: January 30, 2022, 01:35 PM »
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...)