The Bat! Professional Is Not an Easier Email Client - dixonwation

At a Glint

Skilful's Rating

Pros

Inbox analyzer works fountainhead

Our Verdict

Designed to streamline email management, The Squash racket! Vocation node fails to deliver.

The Bat! Professional ($45, thirty-mean solar day free trial) is an email client that makes it easier to deal with an overloaded inbox, but it is cumbersome to apply, especially at first– and that makes it feel the likes of more perturb than it's worth.

The Bat! Professional screenshot — The Bat! Professional looks like your mediocre electronic mail client, with tabs and panes for viewing accounts, folders, message lists, and message previews, but its icons are a bit simplistic, giving it a dated look.

In one case you'ray past the hurdle of getting The Bat Professional upbound and running, and you're well-to-do with its many features, this electronic mail client is a serviceable tool. Just so, too, are its rivals, like Outlook and Thunderbird. While they may not all offer the inbox management tools that The Bat does, they are more polished, professional-looking electronic mail clients.

Installing The Lick International Relations and Security Network't the problem. That's instead easy, and adding your email account (IT supports POP3, IMAP4, and MAPI accounts) is relatively painless.

Because The Bat Master is not as widely secondhand as challenger email clients suchlike Mindset and Thunderbird, finding the right settings for your account terminate involve a bit of searching online. After a couple Google queries, I was able to see the right settings for using The Cricket bat! to check my Gmail score, but I did undergo to depend on unconfirmed advice from a third party.

Adding my Gmail business relationship was easier than gaining access to its contents via The Bat, though. The Clobber!'s interface looks like your average email client, with tabs and panes for viewing accounts, folders, message lists, and message previews. Its icons are a bit simplistic, though, bighearted it a dateable look, and when the picture's use ISN't immediately apparent, hovering over it doesn't fetch awake whatever text to clue you in. That's why I found using The Bat implicated a bit of tribulation and wrongdoing, especially when I was getting started.

Viewing the contents of my inbox was challenging. The Bat!'s familiar layout listed the write u details in a panel happening the left wing side of the screen, while the right-handed side was broken into two panes, conceivably for wake a list of messages on top and a message preview on the bottom. But clicking on my account properties never brought up a catch of the messages in my account; as an alternative the two panes on the mighty displayed details of The Squash racquet!'s configuration. A scrolling ticker at the bottom of the screen displayed my messages, making it solid to get an overview of the contents of my account. It wasn't until I closed The Bat and re-opened IT that I was capable to ascertain a traditional view of my email messages.

The Bat Professional's tools for streamlining your email direction were a bit easier to use, but again, they feature something of a learning curve.

The Inbox Analyzer is configured to prepare your newsletters and the people with whom you frequently correspond. Information technology does that with folders and filters, and IT did a remarkably good job of identifying some common people with whom I frequently trade messages. It did mislabel messages from a fewer friends and colleagues as "Newsletters," though. I like The Bat's ability to set up labels, folders, and virtual folders (which contain references to messages, not the actual message itself), totally of which piddle filtering and determination the messages you take easier.

The Bat Professional includes tools for streamlining the sending of messages, including postponed sending and macros and Quick Templates, which can be used for inserting pre-prepared text into the body of messages. And, this feature doesn't raise any red flags about junk e-mail. The folks at RITLabs say The Bat! is dead not a tool for spammers. Patc thither have been reports of any organizations blocking incoming mail from The Bat! because of the threat of spam, RITLabs says this block is an error and should be reported to them.

—Liane Cassavoy