The Bat! is an email client for the Microsoft Windows operating system. It supports folders, filtering, viewing HTML email without the need to have Internet Explorer installed, and international character sets. It also has a special feature named Mail Ticker, and can import messages from Microsoft's Outlook and Outlook Express programs. Version 2.0 introduced full IMAP support, a basic HTML editor, Anti-Spam Plug-in and a Scheduler. The current version is 3.0 release 1st September 2004.

In the marketplace it competes with Eudora, Pegasus Mail and several browser-integrated email clients as a less virus-prone replacement for Microsoft Outlook Express. It is well respected within the computer industry, and has won a number of awards. Some say its user interface is not very intuitive, but this may be overcome by the high level of available customization.

The Bat! is developed by RitLabs (Stefan Tanurkov), a company based in Chisinau, Moldova.

Many spam messages have the x-mailer field set to The Bat!, but this because it is one of the default settings in the Advanced Mass Sender program, which is frequently used for sending spam mail.

Like most email clients that are not freeware or tied to another product (such as an operating system or a web browser) The Bat! is distributed as shareware.

See also

• List of email clients
• Comparison of email clients

External link

• The Bat! homepage