Postbox - the e-mail application for Windows and Mac OS that we first mentioned back in February has exited it's long Beta period and reached a 1.0 release.

Postbox pitches itself as being 'smarter than your average e-mail client'. Built on a Mozilla core, the application works behind the scenes to catalog everything in your mail. Text, contacts, addresses, links, pictures, attachments - all of them are indexed, providing a very powerful search experience and a useful e-mail view that abstracts potentially interesting content from the body of the e-mail itself.

If, like me, you use GMail, you will have become accustomed to the conversation based message view and this is a perspective that Postbox retains, making migration from the web interface to the Postbox application a painless process. Postbox is compatible with a wide range of e-mail services (Gmail via IMAP and POP3, MobileMe, AOL Mail, Windows Live Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail Plus as well as any generic IMAP or POP3 account) and includes excellent integration with the most popular services. One such example is the integration between Postbox's powerful 'To Do' flagging function and GMail's own 'Star' system.

The feature list is really too extensive to list here, but includes RSS support, Newsgroups support, Facebook / Friendfeed / Twitter integration, emoticons, draft auto-saving, password protection, spam filtering, return receipts, add-ons and much more.

Postbox retails for $39.95 with discounts available for 'Family Pack' purchases. A 'Lifetime Upgrade' option is also available.

By far the best way to experience Postbox's powerful search facility and unique content abstraction is by trying it - and thankfully a free trial is available from the Postbox site.

The only question is... is there still a place for desktop e-mail clients in today's online e-mail environment?

Just a week after Digsby widened its private beta by giving away 5,000 invites to Download Squad readers, the development team has already issued 4 new builds of the chat, email, and social networking client. Probably the most significant new feature is support for proxy settings to help users get around corporate firewalls.

There are a ton of other bug fixes and minor new features as well, including:

• A fix for "connection lost" issue when logging in
• A fix for MSN Messenger IMs not being sent
• A fix for Digsby getting stuck while loading skins during the login
• A fix for freezes while logging into Yahoo! Messenger
• Ctrl + Backapsace now deletes one word at a time in the input box

If you already have a Digsby account, you can either download the latest client from the Digsby home page or just fire up Digsby on your PC if it's already installed. The client will download all the updates automatically. While the lack of proxy support was one of the main complaints we heard from users last week, there's one other issue we'd love to see Digsby work on: The program's large memory footprint. Digsby can easily use 70MB or more at launch. Considering how many functions the service has, that might not seem like a lot, but similar applications like Pidgin use just a small fraction of the RAM that Digsby does.

We're suckers for all-in-one applications. That's why we were excited to check out Digsby, a new all-in-one utility for managing multiple IM, e-mail, and social networking accounts. Digsby just launched in private beta this week, but we've got 5000 invites to give away to Download Squad readers. Keep on reading to find out how to get yours.

Digsby is a desktop client that lets you chat with contacts no matter which IM service they use. It also includes an e-mail notifier, and a pop up screen for keeping track of Facebook and MySpace updates. You can even add a Digsby chat window to your Facebook page so that anyone viewing your profile can send you instant messages which you can reply to using Digsby.

While more and more people (including most of the staff at DLS) are starting to keep all of their e-mail online, using services like GMail, Windows Live Mail or an Exchange hosted account, there are still plenty of people who prefer using an offline mail client.

While the advantage of storing mail locally is that you can access messages at any time -- whether you are connected to the Internet or not -- that also means that, well, all your mail is on your hard drive. Depending on how much e-mail you get, that can add up to quite a bit of space.

Boing Boing posted a great reminder/tip for all Thunderbird users, make sure you run File --> Compact Folders from time to time. You might not save 20 GB like Cory Doctorow, but you can still claim some space.

Outlook 2007 users can save space/clean up their e-mail boxes by selecting Tools --> Mailbox Cleanup. From there you can choose to archive old messages, empty deleted items folders, find messages of a certain age/size and delete duplicate or alternative versions of messages.

When was the last time you cleaned-up your mail program? If you can't remember, now might be a good time to archive old messages and clear out those deleted items.

If you've ever wanted to sign up for a website just to check it out, but were hesitant to surrender your e-mail address for the fear of worthless e-mails filling your inbox to the brim, there is a solution as elegant as disposable tissues - and it's called Guerrilla Mail.

Now you may have already done something smart like create an e-mail account for the specific purpose of receiving confirmation e-mails and other internet formalities. A good solution, but cumbersome because you still have to login to "confirm" the address and all that other jazz.

This is where Guerrilla Mail shines. Go to the site, click on "give me temporary e-mail," and you have an e-mail address that is all yours for the next fifteen minutes. Receive the e-mails you need to confirm at the address, and voila, forget about it. The beauty of disposable e-mail. No login, no password, just a quick way to deal with the trash. And if you find that you need a little more time, you can always get an extra fifteen minutes.

Obviously, as cool as it is, not too good for important stuff like bank accounts or online transactions - not everything in life is disposable.

It's a problem we've all faced before: We venture away from web based email programs to try those cool-looking desktop email clients everyone's raving about. After getting through the hassle of making sure everything syncs properly, one of the problems many seem to face is duplicate messages. Well, open source Thunderbird users don't stand around letting problems be; They face them with Thunderbird customizations like the Remove Duplicate Messages add-on.

Released by Thorsten W. Schmidt on the Mozilla site, the add-on searches a given folder for duplicate messages and automatically deletes them by tagging all duplicates with a delete flag and one message with the keep flag. To use it, first install it from the Mozilla site. Once installed, open Thunderbird and right click on a folder. Click "Remove Duplicate Messages" and that's it.

The add-on also lets you configure what fields you want to compare such as sender, message, etc. It also checks sub-folders, and can analyze about 1000 messages per second. Finally, you can choose to keep the the bigger, smaller, unread, first found, or last found Message if you have a preference.

[via ghacks]

Google's Blogger platform makes blogging about as simple as it gets. You can start writing your blog a few seconds after signing up for an account and choosing a template. But Blogger has long been a few steps behind other popular blog clients like WordPress and TypePad when it comes to enabling new features.

For example, Google has just added the ability to subscribe to post comments via email. Up until now, if you left a comment on a blog post and wanted to keep up on the conversation, you had to keep checking back with the page. While this might seem great if you're trying to generate more traffic for your site, the truth is most people will forget they ever left a comment and move on.

So it's great to see Google add this feature to Blogger. On the other hand, you can only subscribe to comments if you have a Google account. No Gmail? No e-mail notification for you.

[via Googlified]

Some Gmail users are waking up this morning to a pleasant surprise: IMAP support. We first dug up some dirt on the IMAP-ey goodness last night. But it appears to be a phased rollout. Many users still aren't finding IMAP in their GMail settings.

Now Google is confirming that IMAP support is making the rounds. If you don't see it in your Gmail settings today, keep checking back, as the company is rolling the feature out to users "as fast as [they] can."

Google has also written up a few details about IMAP on the "What's new on Gmail" page. And there's even a handy little video showing how to use IMAP to synchronize Gmail with your iPhone.

The newest version of Mozilla's open-source email client Thunderbird was released today. Thunderbird 2 has a number of enhancements from the previous 1.5 version making it easier to organize messages and keep your inbox secure. Some of the enhancements include:

Message Tagging: You can now tag your email messages with notes such as "Important" or "To Do" to allow you to better filter through messages later.

Message History Navigation: This feature allows you treat Thunderbird like a web browser and tab "Forward" or "Back" through messages as well as toggle between messages and folder views.

Gmail and .Mac integration: Gmail and .Mac users can access their mail within Thunderbird.

Improved Searching: Searches are done more quickly with Thunderbird 2, and popular searches that you do often are saved within the system to make searching easier.

You can check out the full list of enhancements here .

Today, Ryan Kennedy demonstrated why he's the right guy to be the Yahoo! Mail Beta evangelist. One of the best-kept secrets within the new Yahoo! Mail Beta have been the search shortcuts. We've learned a little about them from Josh here and in Ryan's post today at the Y! Mail Updates blog. But the frosting on the cake is the complete reference page provided here.

Ryan promises this will be updated when new shortcuts are rolled out and existing ones change. Thanks Ryan!

The second best-kept secret? While holding down the Ctrl button, click on the Subject line of a viewed email. This generates a search result with all emails with the same subject line. A threaded view of sorts.

One of Gmail's handiest features has long been its ability to open a large variety of attachments with its "View as HTML" option. Now Google has taken it one logical step futher with an "Open in Google Spreadsheets" option when you receive an Excel file as an attachment. I checked it out and found it to be pretty convenient. While Gmail's HTML view is occasionally lacking, Google Spreadsheets is somewhat more faithful to the original, though charts are still lost in the process. Though like Google Blogoscoped's Philipp Lenssen I'm wary of lock-in, this is the sort of integration "Google Office" needs to compete against other desktop and web-based offerings.

To be honest, I'm starting to get confused. It's been known for some time that the next version of Outlook Express, the one that will ship with Windows Vista, is going to be called Windows Mail. Windows Live Mail, on the other hand, is Microsoft's web-based successor to Hotmail. We've got the web and the desktop covered, right? But now here comes Windows Live Mail Desktop. Uh.. wuh? Fortunately the product has its own blog which gives us some hints, in particular this post that has a handy chart comparing Mail and Live Mail Desktop. Here's what (I think) I know: Windows Live Mail Desktop is going to be a free desktop e-mail client that will sort of be the missing link between Windows Mail and Windows Live, offering support for multiple e-mail accounts in separate folders (including webmail from AOL and Gmail, they say), a new contacts interface that has something to do with Live Messenger, RSS and blogging features, emoticons and inline spell-checking, and a UI that matches Windows Live. And it's currently in a very small managed beta.

Okay, so it looks like there's some interesting work going into Windows Live Mail Desktop, but if it's so much better than Windows Mail, why have two different free e-mail products? Why not offer one really great product with one name rather than confusing the hell out of consumers (and bloggers)?

[Via Slashdot]

Awhile back Google started beta-testing Gmail For Your Domain, a hosted e-mail service that lets you use Gmail's slick webmail interface for e-mail addresses from your own domain name. It's still a closed beta, but a blogger at Science Addiction managed to get his domain on the list (go here to try for yourself) and has written a review of the service (if the site is down from Slashdotting, the author has a mirror here). Beta testers get 25 free 2GB e-mail accounts with all of Gmail's standard features including spam blocking and Gmail chat, plus an easy administration panel, e-mail lists (i.e. alias addresses for whole groups of users), color scheme and logo customization, and a few more bits and bobs. The author says that setting it up is painless and the experience is satisfying. He also says that the interface hints that Gmail For Your Domain will include some form of paid service. No word yet on when it will be available to the general public.

One of the Mozilla foundation's lower-profile projects is SeaMonkey, the modern incarnation of the old Mozilla Suite. SeaMonkey is an all-in-one bundle consisting of a modern web browser, e-mail and newsgroup client, an IRC client, and an HTML editor. Today its first major release--1.0--hit the streets. You can download it for all major platforms from the SeaMonkey web site or check out the release notes to see what's new.

Since its debut, people have been scratching their heads over Gmail's mysterious lack of a one-click Delete button, and went to great lengths to make it easier to send messages to the trash. Finally Google gave in and this week Gmail got a wee tiny update, and now there's finally a real Delete button right next to "Report Spam." We knew you'd come around, Google.