I've been using The Bat! for so long that I can hardly remember when I installed it for the first time. I have been stuck on version 2.12 pro (!!) for a decade or so, using it to run about a dozen different e-mail accounts, a mixture of POP3 and IMAP. Inevitable, in spite of the occasional annual cleanup, the message database increased to so many thousands of messages and related attachments that the program became slooowww and often refused to close, or at least to close within a reasonable timeframe (like within an hour or so- 
). Sometimes it hung. And it did not read HTML massages directly, which became more and more problematic as everyone these days sends messages in HTML with a lot of the message in graphical form - esoecially if it's commercial - simply the confirmation that your invoice for the mobile phone subscription is waiting for you is unreadable if your mail software can not decipher html.
I stuck with the old version as in most ways it did what id had to do, and it ran good enough on my ageing hardware and OS (I'm somewhat of a luddite, I continune to use Win XP ans associated software on 2005-era Thinkpad laptops, that were built so good that they just don't give up).
Still, the html issue became more and more nagging, so recently I tried to run the trial version of The Bat! 7. Backed up my old version, cleaned out some crap to reduce the size of the message database, and installed the new.
Unfortunately it resulted in alert messages fr om the first second, from Windows, and then after about fifteen mintes of playing around, The Bat! itself crashed after having downloaded a few dozen messages from a server. It just closed, after telling me that there had unfortunately been a problem and that I might have lost some work.
That is really unfortunate. The Bat! is by far the e-mail program I liked best. I want control over my mail traffic, and this is the program that has always afforded me that, more than others. I don't like webmail, like gmail, because I want my e-mails stored on my own machine wh ere I can read them offline. I want protection against fishing, and thus I liked not having my mail adresses in the standard Windows address book. Et cetera. The Bat! has been my first-line defense against malware and phishing attacks for a decade. Anyone here who has used it knows what I mean. And I loved the ability to manage mails on a server even in POP, and deciding which ones I actually wanted to download - and the safety of being able to get to these messages a second time in case of a computer crash (I always kept my mails on the servers for at least a month so I could go back to them, or get to them from another computer).
The new clothes of The Bat! look good, the html is implemented well, but most importantly, it has to run and handle a sizeable message base without crashing. Version 7 does not do that any better than my old 2.12, in fact it seems more prone to crashing. Which is a shame.
I know that some of that may be my own fault as I stick with XP (well tuned, SP3, frequently cleaned up with a good crap cleaner, on a machine that is pretty quick for the old OS, and in fact rock stable, I have not seen a blue screen of death in years).
I have deinstalled the new version, gone back to the old (using the backed up message base, no harm done) and will keep it alongside Thunderbird so I can get to those mail servers and reload my recent e-mails if something goes wrong. And I'll visit from time to time to see if a future version does what I need, and seems worth spending my money on (spending a few tenners on really good software is no problem, but it needs to be better and at least as stable as free GNU stuff that is out there; I still have a lot of serious XP-era software running that I paid good money for in the stone age, and I have not upgraded it as the newer versions have more bells and whistles but are not really better, just more bloated and often more crash-prone).
Keep up the good work. Make it crash free and faster - and I'll be back with my credit card.
(one more thing - why don't you have an archive with the various older versions for the luddites like me who run older hardware and OS? Maybe version 3 or 4 would work for the likes of me and at least you'd still have some more happy users out there, even if they don't send you their money immediately...)
). Sometimes it hung. And it did not read HTML massages directly, which became more and more problematic as everyone these days sends messages in HTML with a lot of the message in graphical form - esoecially if it's commercial - simply the confirmation that your invoice for the mobile phone subscription is waiting for you is unreadable if your mail software can not decipher html. I stuck with the old version as in most ways it did what id had to do, and it ran good enough on my ageing hardware and OS (I'm somewhat of a luddite, I continune to use Win XP ans associated software on 2005-era Thinkpad laptops, that were built so good that they just don't give up).
Still, the html issue became more and more nagging, so recently I tried to run the trial version of The Bat! 7. Backed up my old version, cleaned out some crap to reduce the size of the message database, and installed the new.
Unfortunately it resulted in alert messages fr om the first second, from Windows, and then after about fifteen mintes of playing around, The Bat! itself crashed after having downloaded a few dozen messages from a server. It just closed, after telling me that there had unfortunately been a problem and that I might have lost some work.
That is really unfortunate. The Bat! is by far the e-mail program I liked best. I want control over my mail traffic, and this is the program that has always afforded me that, more than others. I don't like webmail, like gmail, because I want my e-mails stored on my own machine wh ere I can read them offline. I want protection against fishing, and thus I liked not having my mail adresses in the standard Windows address book. Et cetera. The Bat! has been my first-line defense against malware and phishing attacks for a decade. Anyone here who has used it knows what I mean. And I loved the ability to manage mails on a server even in POP, and deciding which ones I actually wanted to download - and the safety of being able to get to these messages a second time in case of a computer crash (I always kept my mails on the servers for at least a month so I could go back to them, or get to them from another computer).
The new clothes of The Bat! look good, the html is implemented well, but most importantly, it has to run and handle a sizeable message base without crashing. Version 7 does not do that any better than my old 2.12, in fact it seems more prone to crashing. Which is a shame.
I know that some of that may be my own fault as I stick with XP (well tuned, SP3, frequently cleaned up with a good crap cleaner, on a machine that is pretty quick for the old OS, and in fact rock stable, I have not seen a blue screen of death in years).
I have deinstalled the new version, gone back to the old (using the backed up message base, no harm done) and will keep it alongside Thunderbird so I can get to those mail servers and reload my recent e-mails if something goes wrong. And I'll visit from time to time to see if a future version does what I need, and seems worth spending my money on (spending a few tenners on really good software is no problem, but it needs to be better and at least as stable as free GNU stuff that is out there; I still have a lot of serious XP-era software running that I paid good money for in the stone age, and I have not upgraded it as the newer versions have more bells and whistles but are not really better, just more bloated and often more crash-prone).
Keep up the good work. Make it crash free and faster - and I'll be back with my credit card.
(one more thing - why don't you have an archive with the various older versions for the luddites like me who run older hardware and OS? Maybe version 3 or 4 would work for the likes of me and at least you'd still have some more happy users out there, even if they don't send you their money immediately...)