If you’re not happy with your email program, a new challenger with a fresh face and some impressive search features is worth a look. Postbox (www.postbox-inc.com), available for both Windows and Mac, is a handsome alternative with some well-thought-out details.

In a way, Postbox seems like a throwback to another era. Gmail and the Gmail-inspired makeovers at other online email services regularly add capabilities and attract a growing user base. While sophisticated, standalone clients such as Outlook dominate the workplace, home users tend these days to use Web mail.

That doesn’t mean everyone likes to keep their email out in the “cloud.” Some prefer to store messages right where they can see them, or at least hear them churning on a hard drive. Others might use Web mail but want to access it through a different interface via POP3 (Post Office Protocol) or IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol). For either category of user, Postbox is something to consider. The only downside is that Postbox costs money—$39.95 to be exact, after a 30-day trial period.

Tabs On Email

The clean Postbox interface looks like almost any desktop email program at first glance, but you’ll soon find some organizational enhancements. First and foremost are the content tabs, which start out as icons for attachments, images, links, and contacts near the top right corner of the screen. Click one of those icons, and a tab opens to display the current folder’s entire collection of each type of content.

Postbox offers a nicely designed interface and impressive search ability—at a price.

For example, open the attachments tab to see a list of all attachments belonging to the emails in the currently selected folder. The list shows the attachment file names first, then the subjects and senders of the messages from whence they came. It’s great if you’re looking for files recently emailed to you but don’t want to sort through a mess of messages to find them. “Action buttons” near the bottom of the screen let you quickly save or send files you find. The other content tabs work similarly.

You can also open folders in tabs and keep more than one folder open at a time in multiple tabs. Just right-click on any folder along the left side of the screen and choose Open In New Tab. The same trick works with individual messages. If you can’t live without tabs in your browser, Postbox tabs should make you smile.

Seeking, Finding

While the Postbox interface itself makes it easier to find many types of files, that’s only the beginning. Postbox offers a number of ways to dive into a big email archive and pull out the conversation, attachment, or picture you want.

To make search work, you’ll need to download all of your email from the server so that it can be stored and indexed on your local drive. Postbox will take care of this process automatically, but it might not happen right away if you have a lot of email sitting around. It also means that you will need some space to keep that email, which isn’t much of a big deal in these days of super-huge hard drives. But it is different if you’re used to Web-based email systems.

After your email is accessible on your local system, Postbox regularly indexes it so that searches run more quickly. Indexing won’t be complete at first, so searches might not find everything that matches your terms right off the bat.

Once Postbox gets going, however, the search function works well. Not only can you quickly search text in messages, you can also search through attachments, images, links, and contacts. Type a word or phrase into the main search field at the top of the screen, and then click one of the content tabs to run the search on a specific type of content. You can also click different folders along the left side of the screen to limit the same search to specific locations.

Here And There

Postbox also crams search capabilities in more spots around the program. For example, the compose message screen includes a toolbar along the right side that lets you view the attachment, image, and other content tabs at the same time you’re writing a new email.

That’s far from the end of the list of interesting Postbox features. Whether these and other capabilities are interesting enough to convince users to type in their credit card numbers is a another, as-yet-unanswered question.

by Alan Phelps