FreePOPs

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FreePOPs

Design by	Caprari, Cocchiaro, Schwager, Tassi, and Vellei
Initial release	30 April 2004
Latest release	0.2.6 / 17 November 2007
OS	Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, BeOS
Platform	Cross-platform
Available in	C, Lua
Genre	Email
License	GNU GPL
Website	FreePOPs.org

FreePOPs is an extensible mail proxy. Its primary use is to allow checking and downloading of e-mail from webmails from any conventional POP3 client program, avoiding the need to use a Web browser. It can also be used as an aggregator for RSS feeds and more.

[edit] FreePOPs

FreePOPs is a POP3 daemon with a Lua interpreter and some extra libraries for HTTP and HTML parsing. Its main purpose is translating local POP3 requests (from a local e-mail client for example) to remote HTTP actions on the supported webmails, but it is more flexible than that. For example, a plugin is available that allows receiving news from a website as if they were e-mail messages in a mailbox. FreePOPs can be extended on the fly: plugins can be added or existing ones can be modified by simply changing the relevant script file.

The software is supported by a very active user forum - see below.

FreePOPs is a very useful way of dealing with a webmail as though it were a regular POP3 mailbox. Most webmail providers require you to use a web browser to read and collect your mail. This process can be slow and any mail software client coupled with FreePOPs can do this in the background effectively; for this purpose, FreePOPs can be combined with programs such as PopTray, getmail or Mozilla Thunderbird, to allow scheduled checking of both POP3 mailboxes and webmails in the background.

FreePOPs is Free Software, being released under the GNU GPL License.

[edit] Operating systems

FreePOPs is available on most consumer operating systems, whether included in official software distributions (as is the case with Linux), or in the form of installer packages provided by developers or users.