Baaaaaa......smooch!. Review on Incredimail

I’ve always used Outlook Express as my main email client, and it has always served me well. Functional, efficient, and more, but yet so so dull.

Bring on Incredimail! This relatively new e-mail client does just about everything that Outlook does but is tons more fun to use! It’s available as a free download from https://incredimail.com and is bursting with fun letter backgrounds, animations, email alerts and more.

So what exactly does it have to offer? Firstly, a number of fun backgrounds to jazz up your mail. The program comes with it’s own array of built in backgrounds including smileys, animals and others but you can also visit the site at any time to download any number of your choice. These are arranged under themes and most themes have at least 12 backgrounds on offer. Subjects include animals, star signs, greetings, smileys, butterflies, the list really is endless so you can personalise your e-mails to suit you and the occasion. Once you download your choices, these are automatically stored within Incredimail and each time you choose to write a new mail, you can choose which background you wish to use from a clearly labelled list of themes to the left. You can also opt for a plain background if you prefer. Most of the background images are very small in byte-size so you shouldn’t notice any slowing up when sending e-mails.

Incredimail also offer a large number of animations to add to your messages, either on their own or with a background of your choosing. These are great fun and include images on just about every subject you can think of.

For added fun, you can even add sounds to your mails. Most are wild and whacky (I love the sheep one!) and more choices are available for you to download at the website. Animal sounds and noises seem to be most popular, the turkey one makes interesting listening too! But you can also choose from giggles and laughs, and long smoooochy kisses and other emotions. You can even record your own voice messages to add to your mails (assuming you have a microphone!), which can be great fun if you’re brave enough! These recordings are added as an attachment to your mails when you send them.

And there’s more! You can send e-greetings directly from your inbox, and there is a good range to choose from including the most popular, birthdays, get well, missing you, thinking of you, love, Mother’s day etc. Most are of the cartoon variety but there are also some beautiful scenic greetings and again, tons more on offer to download direct from the website. And you can choose to add an extra animation, sound, or both from those you have stored in your own customised Incredimail.

Incredimail also let you choose from a number of animated notifiers, these tell you when e-mail has arrived by sounds, voices, or both, but always with an animation. Some are funny, some are cute, and some are just plain wild! The wimpy envelope is hilarious! You can choose from many, including animals, the default butler who announces very formally that you have e-mail, or hi-tech, envelopes and more. And you can change your notifier at any time should you become bored with your current one. More are also available to download at site. Male users of the program will heartily approve of the ‘Babe’ notifier!

When you’ve chosen your background, or card, or animation, sound or any combination, and are ready to send your mail, you are treated to another fun animation as it whizzes off, depending on what choices you’ve made. For example, I used a sea faring theme on one of my messages and as the mail was sent, an animation was shown of my message folding up into a boat and sailing off across the high seas, complete with nautical sounds! There are various ‘sending’ animations, mostly based on the theme of your backgrounds and so on. It’s so much fun and Incredimail will certainly appeal to the child in you!

There is more to the program however, than lots of bright and colourful animations and sounds. It is also a very good email client offering you most of the features you would expect from a serious program, very much on a par with Outlook. You can create rules for your messages, so that they can be stored in folders of your choice (all my Mouthshut alerts and mail go into one folder, personal mails into another and so on), and you can set up as many e-mail accounts as you wish, providing that they are pop and smtp based. The one thing this programme will NOT do is download mail from Hotmail or AOL. But it handles web-based accounts that use pop3, such as Yahoo and Lineone.

The address book provided with the programme is very comprehensive, and will store addresses for you automatically if you set up that option. It will also automatically fill in address lines for you once you start typing in the first couple of letters of the address itself. You can also import and export addresses from other address books. Another nice touch within the options is that you can ask the program to choose backgrounds at random for you, everytime you go to write a new email. And you can choose to hear typing sounds as you compose your e-mails too.

Overall, this is a great e-mail client that will appeal to anybody who wants to add fun and giggles to their email messages. And best of all, the program is completely free to download, as are all the backgrounds, animations etc. Plus there are other sites that have been set up by people who have created their own customised backgrounds for you to make use of, there are good links at the main site to those. Give it a try, I feel sure you won’t be disappointed!