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Popcorn Post

Ultrafunk's Popcorn (98 kB, Windows, free, http://www.ultrafunk.com/products/downloads/popcorn.zip) is a freeware email client that allows you to connect to any POP server. You can quick check your POP server for mail in your Inbox. Or choose to get New Mail headers or all Mail Headers. If the mail server also supports SMTP (as many do), you can send email using the Popcorn interface. If you choose, you can even save sent messages to a local folder.

Popcorn supports multiple user profiles. And you can select the profile you need from a drop down box. You can also choose to save a copy of email sent to a local folder. You can also send a copy to another email address. I use my office mail server as the roaming Out box. There's also a transaction log to check if there were any errors during sending and receiving.

Popcorn's transaction log is a much better implementation than Outlook Express' send/receive interface. For added security the app's settings and your email signatures are contained in a .INI file in the same folder as the application. This means that were you to keep Popcorn on a floppy or other removable disk, you would also carry your settings with you.

Besides being free, Popcorn is also pretty compact. Not just in looks, but also in size. Its a mere 176 kB uncompressed! A remarkable achievement in an age of cyber-bloat. Popcorn is a client/server application in the real sense. It doesn't download any email to the local system. Instead the application reads email received directly off the server. It offers you two header options -- brief, partial and full. Choose the first unless you are monitoring an account where you're trying to eradicate the spam and need the complete headers.

Popcorn is really cool for those "on the go" sans a laptop or PDA. Download a copy, and keep the application on a floppy or Zip disk. Make sure your Sent Mail folder is on the removable disk. Now all you need to do is go to a PC with a Net connection. Pop the disk in, fire up the app, connect to the Net, check email and respond appropriately. It's that simple!

Popcorn does have some quirks you need to get used to. For starters, you can only query the Inbox of the remote mail server. Not any of the other folders. Then there's no Address Book. All the application does provide is a list of the last 10 email IDs to which you sent mail using a particular domain.

I found it quite disconcerting to see this list appearing at random in the New Mail To field. I traced the glitch to the way Popcorn responds to my wheel mouse's commands. You do need to check that email is being addressed to the right person. As also when you are sending a copy.

By default, the CC and BCC fields are hidden. However clicking a plus sign on the Send Mail interface pops them open. Another downer is that Popcorn doesn't support HTML or Outlook Rich Text formats either. What you do get to view is the message text interspersed with HTML formatting and reveal codes. You can't also attach files to your emails. However, you can read the first 50 lines of file attachments as long as they are plain text (.TXT) files. You can also set the max downloadable message size (default is 65 kB). Anything over and over this number will be displayed as an attachment.

I see the only competition to Popcorn being the Web-based Mail2Web.com service. This affords the same functionality plus supports HTML and Rich Text formats. It also allows you to attach files. But you need a Web browser and at least a 14.4k connection to access the service.

G Menon
[email protected]

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