The Bat! is an

email client An email client, email reader or, more formally, message user agent (MUA) or mail user agent is a computer program used to access and manage a user's email. A web application which provides message management, composition, and reception functio ...

for the

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

, developed by Ritlabs, SRL, a company based in Chişinău, Moldova. There are two versions: a Home version and a Professional version. The Professional version includes a portable module, The Bat Voyager.

Reviews

Reviews indicate that The Bat! has been regarded as an alternative email client for email users who seek a strong emphasis on security, as well as having many customization and filtering options, yet has also been criticized for its complexity and difficulty in learning. *This Bat really flies (May 2000) Review by TechByter.com *The Bat! 2.0 (February 2004) Review by PCMag.com *The Bat! Best Email Client (May 2005) Review by DonationCoder.com *The Bat! 3.6 Professional review (February 2006) Review by alphr.com *The Bat! 4.0.34 - Spooky Good E-mail Client (October 2008) Review by Brighthub.com *The Bat! Professional Review (February 2006) Review by Softpedia.com *The Bat Professional Is Not an Easier Email Client (July 2012) Review by PCWorld.com *The Bat! Pro Review (March 2016) Review by Filecritic.com *What is The Bat! email Client? (September 2016) Review by TechNews *The Bat! Review (February 2018) Review by VPNCrew.com *The Bat Review (May 2018) Review by Pandia.com *Best Email Clients for Windows (March 2019) Review by Zapier.com *The Bat! Email Client (June 2019) Review by Gadgetspeak.com *6 Best Email Clients for Windows 10 (November 2020) Review by TechGrinch.com *The Bat! 9.4.4 (August 2021) Review by Maddownload.com *The Bat! 9.4.4 (August 2021) Review by DownloadCrew.com

Features

Message Protocol

The Bat! supports

POP3 In computing, the Post Office Protocol (POP) is an application-layer Internet standard protocol used by e-mail clients to retrieve e-mail from a mail server. POP version 3 (POP3) is the version in common use, and along with IMAP the most common p ...

IMAP In computing, the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) is an Internet standard protocol used by email clients to retrieve email messages from a mail server over a TCP/IP connection. IMAP is defined by . IMAP was designed with the goal of per ...

, and

Microsoft Exchange Server Microsoft Exchange Server is a mail server and calendaring server developed by Microsoft. It runs exclusively on Windows Server operating systems. The first version was called Exchange Server 4.0, to position it as the successor to the related ...

email.

Message Management

The Bat! provides virtual folders, advanced filtering, extensive search, a macro language, templates, tags, and color groups to assist in managing email.

Themes and Customization

In November 2020, with release of version 9.3 The Bat! introduced a number of themes to change its look and feel, also providing the ability for further color changes to the themes as provided. Toolbars and menus may also be modified, although doing that is difficult and not well documented.

Data security

*''Encryption.'' The internal

PGP PGP or Pgp may refer to: Science and technology * P-glycoprotein, a type of protein * Pelvic girdle pain, a pregnancy discomfort * Personal Genome Project, to sequence genomes and medical records * Pretty Good Privacy, a computer program for the ...

implementation based on

OpenSSL OpenSSL is a software library for applications that provide secure communications over computer networks against eavesdropping or need to identify the party at the other end. It is widely used by Internet servers, including the majority of HTT ...

lets users encrypt messages and sign them with digital signatures. Digital keys manager is included. PGP up to version 10.0.2 is supported. The Bat! supports

S/MIME S/MIME (Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) is a standard for public key encryption and signing of MIME data. S/MIME is on an IETF standards track and defined in a number of documents, most importantly . It was originally developed by R ...

via Internal Implementation or

Microsoft CryptoAPI The Microsoft Windows platform specific Cryptographic Application Programming Interface (also known variously as CryptoAPI, Microsoft Cryptography API, MS-CAPI or simply CAPI) is an application programming interface included with Microsoft Windows ...

, Secure Socket Layer (SSL) v3.0 / Transport Layer Security (TLS) v1.0, v1.1, and 1.2 (as of version 8.5) with AES algorithm. *''Internal HTML Viewer.'' The Bat!’s internal viewer was replaced in version 9.2.1 with the Chromium web browser rendering engine to ensure HTML formatting is properly rendered, prevent script execution, and provide anti-phishing information. *''Safe handling of attached files.'' The Bat! checks attached file extensions and blocks their launching if they are suspicious. The Bat! warns users of double extension attachments and allows users to see the real extension. *''Selective download.'' Messages can be deleted or left on

servers by setting up respective filters in the Sorting Office. *''OAuth 2.0 Support.'' The Bat! v9.2.3 is in compliance with the Google's security standards related to the OAuth 2.0 protocol for authentication with Gmail, Outlook and Yandex. Version 9.3.2 extended support to Office365.com and Live.com *''TLS AEAD AES-GCM cipher suites support.'' The Bat! v9.1 supports TLS AEAD AES-GCM cipher suites for secure connections with mail servers.

Productivity

*''Sorting Office.'' A filtering system that sorts incoming, outgoing, read, and replied messages to folders; auto-responds; replies with custom templates; forwards, redirects, prints, or exports messages; sends read confirmations; runs external programs and more. *''Message Templates and Macros.'' Email templates contents may be dynamically changed through the use of macros, which can also be used to automatically execute other user-defined functions such as cursor positioning, addressing changes, identity changes, active account changes and other. *''Microsoft Exchange Connectivity.'' The Bat! connects to

using native

MAPI Messaging Application Programming Interface (MAPI) is an API for Microsoft Windows which allows programs to become email-aware. While MAPI is designed to be independent of the protocol, it is usually used to communicate with Microsoft Exchange Se ...

protocol to fetch or send messages. *''Multilingual Interface.'' Support for 18 languages. *''IDN support.'' Support for IDNs that contain characters from non-Latin alphabets such as Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic and Greek. IDN support includes Latin alphabet-based characters with diacritics, such as those found in French and German.

History

*1.0 Beta, the first public version, was released in March 1997. It supported folders, filtering, viewing

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...

email without the need to have

Internet Explorer Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated IE or MSIE) is a series of graphical user interface, graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft which was used in the Microsoft Wind ...

installed, and international character sets. It also had a special feature named MailTicker. *1.00 Build 1310, the first stable version, came to public in March 1998. *1.32 introduced a proprietary layout engine on 27 April 2000. Versions up to 1.31 was used the THtmlViewer engine by David Baldwin. *Version 2.0 (September 2003) introduced

support, a basic HTML editor, Anti-

Spam Spam may refer to: * Spam (food), a canned pork meat product * Spamming, unsolicited or undesired electronic messages ** Email spam, unsolicited, undesired, or illegal email messages ** Messaging spam, spam targeting users of instant messaging ( ...

and

Anti-Virus Antivirus software (abbreviated to AV software), also known as anti-malware, is a computer program used to prevent, detect, and remove malware. Antivirus software was originally developed to detect and remove computer viruses, hence the name. ...

Plug-ins and a Scheduler, and could import messages from

Microsoft Office Outlook Microsoft Outlook is a personal information manager software system from Microsoft, available as a part of the Microsoft Office and Microsoft 365 software suites. Though primarily an email client, Outlook also includes such functions as cale ...

and

Outlook Express Outlook Express, formerly known as Microsoft Internet Mail and News, is a discontinued email and news client included with Internet Explorer versions 3.0 through to 6.0. As such, it was bundled with several versions of Microsoft Windows, from ...

*Features and changes for version 2.1 to the present version may be viewed at

System requirements

Compatible with Microsoft Windows XP and later versions. No minimum requirements for memory size or CPU speed. Runs on any Windows PC platform with at least 1024x768 screen resolution, and on Windows tablets.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Bat! Windows email clients Windows-only software Shareware Portable software 1997 software