E-mail Clients

Of late, we've been witnessing a tremendous shift in preferences of Web-browsers and

e-mail clients, probably because more choices are available and they are becoming increasingly feature rich. Many e-mail clients today go beyond

basic sending and receiving of e-mail. They now have better security features, can maintain schedules, let you take notes, read RSS feeds and much more. 

Of course, the basic ones that only send and receive mail haven't disappeared if that's your worry. 

In this shootout, we've tested some popular e-mail clientsfor their features (basic and advanced) and performance, and presented a comparative analysis to help you choose the best one. We checked them for a number of things. For one, we downloaded 210 spam messages from a POP3 server and checked how many each client was able to filter out as junk with default settings. 

We also checked how much memory each mail client consumed when idle, and the amount of hard drive space it

ate up on a default, and clean install. We also checked each client for its filtering and mailbox and contact-search capabilities, and of course all the features that it supports. This analysis will collectively be able to answer the questions that are on your mind when choosing an e-mail client; such as what are the features that I or my business need from an e-mail client?; do I need integrated personal information management software on it?, and will the client make me less vulnerable to the kind of malicious attacks that I faced? 

We've tested all of these e-mail clients on a P4 machine with 512 MB DDR RAM running on Win XP Professional SP2. The ratings are based on cumulative scores of variety of tests we carried out under a particular category for each e-mail client.

Binesh Kutty