A Bat Delayed, Filetered, and Still Not Shaken

The Bat already had an option to schedule a message. Write it in the evening and go to bed. Schedule the message to be sent at 2 am tomorrow, telling your boss how happy you are to be working on a big project even if you have to stay up late to finish it. OK, so maybe there are better uses for this, but I'm sure somebody will use it the way I've described. You do, of course, need to leave the computer on and The Bat must be running for this to work as intended.

Popular in Europe, but essentially unknown in North America, The Bat was released in 1997. At the time, I thought it had great promise, but continued to use Eudora until about 2000, when I switched to The Bat. The program is a product of Ritlabs, SRL, based in Chisinau, Republic of Moldova, a region of the former USSR. The Bat doesn't currently pose a major threat to Microsoft Outlook, but it has several million users around the world. I like it because I can program it to do just about anything.

Scheduling, for example. Other email clients, such as Outlook, also allow you schedule a delivery time for a single email, but it isn't possible to do this for all outgoing messages. Instead of specifying an exact date and time to send messages, you set a specific amoung of delay. So when I think, 5 seconds after sending a message, that I intended to add a comment, I can just open the message and add the comment. This reduces the number of times that I have to send a message that begins with "Oops. Sorry, but I meant to add this bit of information to my previous message."

Full text can be found here.