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?

Postbox is an email client based on Mozilla Thunderbird. But it has a number of features you won't find in Thunderbird, including Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed integration. That makes Postbox more than a simple email client. It's a communications hub. It also has a task list, and thanks to support for add-ons, including the Lightning calendar extension, you can customize the application to add even more functions.

Today the Postbox team released beta 14 of the email client, and also announced support for another plugin that lets you sync your contact data with Google and Zimbra. There's also a new theme for Windows Vista and 7, and a handful of other updates. That's the good news.

The other announcement Postbox made today is that the company will begin charging for Postbox when it leaves beta. A single license will set you back $29.95, plus $9.95 per license for up to 5 members of your household. You can also purchase lifetime upgrades for an extra $19.95. Those are the prices for customers that pre-order. The prices will go up a bit after August 31st.

Overall, the pricing sounds pretty reasonable, but only if you think Postbox offers enough features that you need which aren't already available in the free Thunderbird email client.

[via gHacks]

Postbox is a powerful email client based on Mozilla's Thunderbird, and, like Thunderbird, it now supports extensions. The selection of add-ons is limited right now, but it includes some useful ones: ReminderFox handles reminders and to-do items. Minimize to Tray is just what it sounds like, allowing Windows users to put Postbox in the system tray. Nostalgy adds keyboard shortcuts, and MozBackup backs up your messages and settings. This is a good start, but it'll interesting to see what other useful extensions pop up now that the door is open.

The latest build of Postbox also adds a long list of other useful features. If you're switching from Mail.app, you can now easily migrate your settings to Postbox. Postbox will now also pull photos for your contacts from OS X's address book or from Twitter. Several performance upgrades and fixes of annoying issues from earlier versions are also in place now, so it looks like a good time to consider giving Postbox a try.

Postbox is an email client and address book application for OS X and Windows built on Mozilla Thunderbird code. But Postbox has a ton of features that you won't find in Thunderbird, including a number of social features and connections to web services like twitter, FriendFeed, and Facebook.

You can easily import your contact list from Outlook or Thunderbird into Postbox. And when you login to Facebook, those contacts will be added as well. Postbox indexes your messages, contacts, images, links, and attachments, making it simple to search for items stored in your emails.

There's a to do list, but no calendar. And there's no support for plugins, which means you can't use the Lightning Thunderbird extension. But Postbox is still in beta, so perhaps we'll see a built in calendar or add-on support down the road.

[via CNet]