ePrompter:: E-mail Retrieval and Notification Utility
You can download a beta version that works with a MyWay e-mail address here. Issues with several e-mail clients have been resolved (or close to it). The Bottom Line is, if you manage multiple e-mails with different POP or web clients, the services this program delivers can't be found anywhere for free! First off, I've read several reviews on ePrompter recently that suspect the author has somehow planted spyware that transmits passwords or e-mail messages and crap like that. That's just plain dumb! This can hold true to 99% of internet communication programs you all use daily!
In my search of an easy to use utility to check multiple POP mail addresses, I’ve come across one that not only does that, but sports more features as well. It’s not too often I get excited about a Freeware program, as many do fall short of expectations.
It is compatible with Microsoft Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP
What ePrompter Does
ePrompter is an e-mail retrieval and notification utility and able to retrieve not only POP mail, but many web-based e-mails as well. These can include Yahoo Mail, HotMail, Juno, Go.com, Netscape, Mail.com, and many others.
Ok so we can retrieve all our mail, now what if I want to reply to these e-mails? No problem! Just hit reply and compose your message, and it’ll be sent out on the next update. One word of caution though, many ISP’s do not allow remote use of SMTP as I’ve found out. I am unable to send mail based from my ISP from my work location because of this. This is not the case with any of the web-based client e-mail.
The outgoing message will contain an ad for ePrompter with a link, but it truly is a small price to pay.
Download and Setup
• The file is just under 1 MB (2.5 MB installed) and setup is fairly easy. It does consume about 7.5 MB of memory on a fairy consistent basis as reported by the Windows XP Task Manager.
• Setting up each e-mail account is a snap, as ePrompter fills in as many blanks for you as possible, many times the obvious entry isn’t always the correct one so double-check it.
• If you’re setting up POP mail you’ll need to get not only your POP server address, but the SMTP as well. Most likely you can glean this through Outlook Express, or any other program you’re using.
• When typing in a description for the account that will display on the interface, keep it short or it gets ugly and real fast! ;)
The Interface
It’s very clean and easy to update not only one mail account, but all simultaneously. Click Update to update all, or just right-click the e-mail you want updated before the normal scheduled update.
• Any new messages are signaled through a sound file (if desired) and a flashing colored circle in the taskbar. Each color represents an e-mail address. After using the program for a period of time, you’ll get to know what color goes with what. You also have the option to use notifications as a screensaver, which I don’t utilize.
• Scheduled updates can be setup to check mail from 1 minute to 12 hours or manually if desired.
• Clicking the close button “X does not exit the program, but sends it to the tray. This is something that I usually don’t like, but in this case it makes sense.
• Well so far I haven’t mentioned how they manage to keep this free. In the upper right-hand corner sits an unobtrusive banner about 1” by 2 1/2 “. This is evident in not only the main interface, but the e-mail account and read message interfaces. To be perfectly honest, I really don’t notice them anymore. With this comes the concern of spyware. To this day, I have not noticed any suspicious activity, nor have I read of any related to this utility. I’m not saying it’s not there, just that it’s unknown to me.
Of course you may be concerned with your bandwidth being consumed by the downloading of images for the banners. I don't see them rotated too often, plus they're so small in size, you may not even notice.
• You have the option of just retrieving headers without download the entire message. I personally don’t use this since any attachment isn’t sent to your system anyway and left on the server.
• What we could really use here is an address book don’t you think? It’s got that too! Unfortunately there is no way to import an address book that I can see! So you’ll have to manually input each addy. • Allows you to compose e-mail with the simple but efficient interface. Again, no attachments allowed. Your e-mail is sent on the next update.
My Primary Use
Since I carry several e-mail addresses for various reasons, it was becoming a hassle to visit each site just to collect my mail. Now there have been other programs that retrieve e-mail remotely, but none that I’ve seen or tried that are as flexible as this program. None of the programs that I’ve tried were capable of multi-server use.
Limitations
• Limited to the retrieval of 100 messages at a time from HotMail. I’m not sure if this holds true for any of the other servers, but I imagine it’s a limitation of ePrompter. If you use HotMail, you know what I mean about 100+ messages weekly! ;) I have since abandoned my HotMail account.
• Reading mail is restricted to just text, and sometimes this can be a garbled mess if it’s mixed with HTML. No images, archived files, can be viewed. This limitation is, by the way, a blessing in disguise! Since many of today’s viruses or worms exploit Microsoft’s Outlook (Express), this is one way of combating this problem. This way you can delete the message remotely without ever having it enter your system in the first place.
• The interface used for reading messages can not be maximized. Not too big of a deal, but I like the top application to have the full foreground if I desire. As of this writing, ePrompter does not support the popular MyWay e-mail. This is being promised in a future update.
Some Problems
• With Yahoo Mail, I’ve noticed that many times new mail arrives at my box but does not show up as being new in ePrompter.
• While you may not consider this a problem, I do. The inability to schedule each e-mail account individually. For example, I may want to check my main address on a 30 minute basis, but my Yahoo account every 5 minutes. This is not possible. The reason why I find this annoying is some accounts take much longer than others to update. This is not the fault of ePrompter, but that of the server. Plus, many of my e-mail boxes contain SPAM which I would rather wait until I’m ready to scan through the incoming for important messages. If you don’t mark messages as Read, it’ll chime and flash until you open the box and do so. (ok, I’m being picky)
Overall
I’ve been using this program for over a year and I’ve been quite pleased with not only its stability, but the convenience factor as well. The ads don’t bother me and they can stick all the ads they want in there as long as they keep it free!
I recommend this utility to anyone who manages multiple e-mail addresses with different servers and if you don’t mind not being able to view attachments.
Update January 2005 ePrompter now supports GMail
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