Vendor's Description
IncrediMail is an advanced, feature-rich email program that offers you an unprecedented interactive experience. Unique multimedia features will enable you to tailor your email experience so that it fits your mood and personality. Visual effects will entertain your every sense.

Setup
There are two versions of IncrediMail: one is free and includes the basic functionality of the email client, and the premiere version extends the capabilities by allowing more skins, animations, and other features. You can download the freeware version, and then upgrade it later if you decide you want the extended features. Once I installed IncrediMail, the initial setup was similar to other email clients; you could let the wizard perform the setup or you can be prompted through a series of questions to manually enter in your POP server account data.

To upgrade from the free version to the premium version costs $29.95, and provides advanced account access, more skins, more notifiers, and no advertisements. This review is for the upgraded premiere version of IncrediMail, and was reviewed on Windows XP.

Email Client
As an email client, I found IncrediMail to be very stable. I was able to check my email (status of mail sending and receiving is in a large status box) and send email without a hitch.

What makes InrediMail stand apart from other email clients is the array of multimedia eye candy included. You can assign different notifiers that inform you when you have new mail. A notifier stands separate from the actual email client, and simply informs you that you have email. It is generally some character appearing on your screen coupled with a sound. Double clicking the character closes the notifier and opens the IncrediMail client. For example, a dog suddenly runs across your screen and barks at you, or a waiter in tuxedo walks across the screen and informs you that you have mail. There are a handful of notifiers that come with the software, and a whole bunch more available on the web site. You can also set it up so that IncrediMail randomly chooses a notifier each time it detects you have mail. I set mine up with the random option, and it worked wonderfully.

The client itself can be configured to use a variety of different skins (aka, colors, shapes, sounds and design of the buttons, windows and menus). Like the notifiers, IncrediMail comes with a handful of skins, and many more can be downloaded from the web site. You can choose from the theme of blue jeans, rusted metal, treehouse, titanium and more. The freeware version allows you to preview other notifiers, but only lets you select the standard sapphire theme. Some of the themes, such as treehouse and titanium, also come with associated sounds that play when the client opens up. One problem I noticed in titanium is that the send mail window does not appear to recognize that the titanium theme was dark; hence, it displayed most of the prompts in the default black text, making it very difficult to read. The skins also have an option to display a different skin at random when starting up the client, but in my test, the random feature did not work very well. Each day IncrediMail started up with the same skin as the day before.

Some other neat features in IncrediMail are for sending email. You can set the typing clicks on, thus giving it a typewriter feel to it (I generally don't like that in other applications, but it seems to work well withint the context of writing email). When you send an email, you can have different animation effects to snaz things up a bit. For example, the email page folds up and then flies off as if the letter you just wrote is physically being delivered, or the email window breaks into puzzle pieces and zooms out. The effects appear to be tied in to the stationery chosen for composing the email (see following paragraph). I could not find a way to select a default effect for all sending.

In addition to the effects experienced on the client, IncrediMail includes additional effects on the actual email being sent by way of stationery (you need to be careful with this because I found that not all email clients recognize the IncrediMail stationery and animations). For instance, of the many stationery sets to choose from, there is one that places a gorgeous beach background on the email page. Another stationery is called "Peek-a-Boo/Hey There", where the background is aged yellow paper with a duck character peeking in at the bottom of the email and waiving his hand. It is nice composing an email on stationery, and I enjoyed the animation effects when the email was delivered. However, in some cases, the recipient does not see what you see. For instance, when sending the email with stationery to a Eudora user on a Mac, Eudora processed a JPEG file, but upon displaying the email, there was no picture, only the text preceded by the following:

SU1CTDEsNDEsgUmBSYXFiYmVwcUkTYEogZlNiZnBiU3FiZmZTZk4mSidiZ
koiZ2JMEksSU1CTDIsMCwsSU1CTDMsMCwsVHlwZVZlcnNpb24sMywxLjAs
X-BG: <66D7807A-3931-40A9-A261-B8DD10032CDB>
X-BGT: no-repeat
X-BGC: #92c1d3
X-BGPX: center
X-BGPY: center
X-ASN: BFF138F0-3EFC-11D4-BA3D-0050DAC68030
X-ASNF: 0
X-ASH: BFF138F0-3EFC-11D4-BA3D-0050DAC68030
X-ASHF: 1
X-AN: EE860250-5330-11D4-BA52-0050DAC68030
X-ANF: 0
X-AP: EE860250-5330-11D4-BA52-0050DAC68030
X-APF: 1
X-AD: C3C52140-4147-11D4-BA3D-0050DAC68030
X-ADF: 0
X-AUTO: X-ASN,X-ASH,X-AN,X-AP,X-AD
X-CNT: ;

Sending to Eudora on the PC, the email comes in just as plain text (the user does not see the above nor do they see the background picture). Outlook and Outlook Express on Windows XP do appear to pick up the effects and display them properly (albeit, Outlook was a bit sluggish opening up email that had an effect). Using Microsoft Exchange appears to simply attach a JPEG of the background picture. It seems really cool thinking that others will be receiving the stationery, but unless your recipients are using IncrediMail or Outlook, they will either see the above header noise, or just a plain email with a JPEG attached. If you aren't sure what email clients your recipients are using, it's best to not use stationery (i.e., the "plain text" stationery). An option to not transfer the stationery to the recipient would be nice for those who like to type on the background but only want plain text sent out. Also, selecting plain text, you'll be stuck with just the one animation effect for mail delivery since the effects are tied to specific stationery.

In terms of standard email client customizations and functionality, IncrediMail is better than browser clients, but falls a little short of more established clients such as Eudora and Outlook. For instance, a feature that I depend upon for managing mailing lists is the ability to "redirect" email, which is a way of forwarding incoming email to a different recipient, but making it look like it is coming from the original sender. IncrediMail has the ability to create rules for this kind of redirection, but there is no way to do it on the fly. Outlook does not support redirect either, but Eudora does.

While IncrediMail's library of stationery is extensive, it doesn't support the standard text stationery that Eudora supports. In other words, if you have a standard text message that you like to respond with frequently, I could not find any way within IncrediMail to establish such stationery and reply with it. Additionally, IncrediMail does not appear to have an option to set your standard view font when receiving text-only email. Since text-only email is generally fixed width, you want the ability to view it in fixed width so that formatted text and signatures can be viewed properly and aligned. ASCII art in a proportional font turns into a big mess. I also could not find a preference to instruct IncrediMail where to place my attachments, and there was no option to use a quote delimeter when replying to text (instead of the standard indentation format that IncrediMail defaults to).

When you elect to keep your email on the POP server, IncrediMail includes a menu function for viewing your email on the server. Choosing this option opens a separate window where you can see what mail resides on the server, and you can then choose to delete it from the server. I think it's good to have this kind of access, but I prefer the method that Eudora uses. In Eudora, you can leave the mail on the server when reading your email, but there is also a server icon in each email message that allows you to delete from the server if you desire. This gives you all the server manageability you need while keeping things in one mailbox window. Another server function IncrediMail supports is multiple accounts. You can select New Identity, and then enter in information for other POP accounts. This is a good feature to have, although IncrediMail can improve upon it's implementation. Typically, multiple accounts are all for myself, so I would want the same preferences for each. IncrediMail separates the preferences between identities, and you have to re-establish them each time you create a new identity. Also, I like the ability to be able to change the "identity" when sending email (aka, on-the-fly), but IncrediMail does not support that.

The address book in IncrediMail is well done, but could be improved upon. For instance, the import function recognizes other email clients, such as Eudora, but when I tried importing my address book from Eudora, the contacts created within IncrediMail were all junk (in the email address field there was a truncated portion of the person's name instead of an email address). The IncrediMail address book lets you create contacts easy enough, and even supports groups, but once I had a group created, the address book window did not support dragging contacts to the group name to expand the group. Instead, you had to double-click the group name, and then add new contacts in a different window. A nice feature of IncrediMail when addressing email is that when you start typing into the address field, a popup is displayed with a list of known email addresses that start with the letters you've typed in. You can then simply select one to complete the addressing. I noticed that it displayed email addresses that were not even in my address book, so I assume that it has some history of email addresses. Unfortunately, I could not find a way to display that history list (would be nice to be able to go into the history and moves some addresses into my address book).

Finally, what's also noticeably missing from IncrediMail is the ability to setup an LDAP server, thus allowing you to query server address books.

Summary
IncrediMail is a multimedia rich email client that provides all the email functionality that most people need. Some of the multimedia features that are incorporated into stationery email do not translate too well to other email clients. There are enough multimedia features that are reserved just for the IncrediMail user (aka, that don't affect your recipients) to make it a fun experience sending email. Some email functionality is not yet supported within IncrediMail, such as redirect, view font settings, and LDAP servers, so some power users may prefer other more matured products that support all their needs. On the other hand, the bulk of standard email functions are present and stable within IncrediMail, so for the average email user, IncrediaMail delivers all the email functionality you need with the bonus of multimedia fun.

Pros

• Animations, sounds and skins are cool
• Freeware version available
• Stable email client
• Variety of entertaining notifiers
• Great Web Site support for add-ons

Cons

• No extended functionality, such as "redirect"
• Preference limitations (e.g., no way to set font for incoming text-only views, no quoting settings on replies)
• Some limitations to address book management and Eudora imports failed
• No LDAP server support
• No Mac version

Overall Rating:

3 1/2 out of 5 Mice