Postbox Express

Postbox Express is the free version of Postbox.  Postbox itself is free for 30 days and then only costs US$10.00 (about £7.50) so it isn’t about to break the bank.

Needless to say, the cut down version has the same look and feel but just lacks some of the functionality of the full blown version.

Both Postbox and Postbox Express seem to have been derived from Thunderbird.  Some of the features in both pieces of software are found in Thunderbird as well but not in most other email software.

The nice people at Postbox have a great feature comparison chart here.  Click here to see our Postbox page.

When you start up Postbox Express, it suggests helping you by using all your settings from other email software you may already have installed. It searches your machine, finds whatever you may have and then updates itself once you have told it which to choose.  Having done that within a couple of minutes it will beep to let you know that the most recent email is synced as well.

Handy Features!

Email threading where you can see all the emails in a given thread is great (and not available in all email packages).

Searching is thought through well. The software remembers old searches and suggests similar ones to you as you are typing a new one in so that regularly used searches pop up quickly, and if you need to do an advanced search, then there’s just a simple form.
MakeUseOf lets you choose an email address that you want to include in Postbox Express and then goes off and finds your email server and populates the necessary settings in order to include the address in its ‘serviced’ addresses.  It makes adding a pre-existing address very handy.  Postbox Express was one of the first email packages to do that, even if more and more are doing it now.
Post – for Social Networking
‘Post’ is a button which lets you post to Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed from inside Postbox Express. If you want to share something quickly but not have to switch into a browser and end up being distracted by your friends status updates, this gives you a small dialogue box so you can say it quickly and move on.
Topics

‘Topics’ is another useful feature.  By assigning a topic to an email (or the other way round if you prefer to think of it that way), you can quickly separate work email from home email, or urgent email from non-urgent email.   And, having got your mind round the idea, you can allocate Topics retrospectively, so you can assign them individually or using filters.

Tabs

One of the features started in the Firefox browser is found in Postbox Express having come to it via Thunderbird – tabs.  Displaying different emails on different tabs makes life so much easier if you need to refer to several emails at once.

Postbox Express for Mac

The installation is completely standard Mac – simply drag Postbox Express into the Applications folder. You can choose to let spotlight search within Postbox Express, and to link Postbox Express to iCal, iPhoto, Safari, Dictionary or other Mac apps. You can also drag and drop files on top of the Postbox dock icon in order to create a new message with that item as an attachment which is great.

Postbox Express for Windows

The only real difference between the Mac version and the Windows version is in design. Mac has slick black pop-ups, whereas Windows has shiny grey.

 

Postbox Express Settings for Net2Air

Coming soon…