The Bat!

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The Bat!
Developed by RitLabs
Latest release 4.0.24 / April 23, 2008
OS Windows
Genre E-mail client
License shareware
Website www.ritlabs.com/en/products/thebat/

The Bat! is a shareware e-mail client for the Microsoft Windows operating system, developed by RitLabs, a company based in Chişinău, Moldova.

Contents

[edit] History

1.0 Beta, the first public version, was released in March 1997. It supported folders, filtering, viewing HTML e-mail without the need to have Internet Explorer installed, and international character sets. It also had a special feature named Mail Ticker.

1.00 Build 1310, the first stable version, came to public in March 1998.

1.32 introduced the Robin layout engine on 2000-04-27. Versions up to 1.31 had used the THtmlViewer engine by David Baldwin.

Version 2.0 (September 2003) introduced IMAP support, a basic HTML editor, Anti-Spam and Anti-Virus Plug-ins and a Scheduler, and could import messages from Microsoft Office Outlook and Outlook Express

Version 3.0 (September 2004) introduced customisable User Interface, virtual folders, Mail Chat, Biometric authentication and support of MAPI protocol to connect to Microsoft Exchange Servers.

Version 3.95 (December 2006) supports IPv6.

Version 4.0 (February 2008) has Address History option, Favorite Folders sets and URL manager for HTML images retrieval. The Bat!'s text editor supports Unicode, internal image viewer supports rotate, advanced resize and zoom algorithms and full screen mode.

[edit] Market Position

In the marketplace it competes with Eudora, Pegasus Mail and several browser-integrated e-mail clients as a less virus-prone replacement[1] for Microsoft Outlook Express. It is well respected within the computer industry,[2][3] and has won a number of awards.[4] The user interface of The Bat! has a high level of available customization. It has powerful message filtering capabilities.[5] It also supports templates and in fact allows three different levels of template creation. This along with macros allows for extensive automation of almost every aspect of mailing.[6]

[edit] Forged headers

A number of Internet service providers,[7] sites and organisations[8] claim that The Bat! is a spamming tool and, on that basis, block messages containing "The Bat!" in an x-mailer header.

Many spam messages have the X-Mailer header field set to The Bat!, but this is because it is one of the default settings in the Advanced Mass Sender program, which is frequently used for sending spam mail.

The fraction of messages with forged "X-Mailer: The Bat!" in spam messages is probably a small minority.[citation needed] Some ISPs, being unaware of this, set traffic filters that block messages containing "X-Mailer: The Bat!". This forces legitimate users to configure The Bat! to not include X-Mailer field into the messages that they send.

Programs such as SpamAssassin can detect many instances of forged "X-Mailer: The Bat!" headers by looking at other parts of the message, for example HTML body, message-id, charset and boundary information.[9]

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

[edit] References

  1. ^ Gaskin, James. Broadband Bible. Wiley, 144. ISBN 0-7645-6951-1. 
  2. ^ Kraynak, Joe. Top 100 Simplified Tips & Tricks, 133. ISBN 0-7645-7474-4. 
  3. ^ Winder, Davey. "Product Reviews: The Bat! 3.6 Professional", PC Pro Magazine, Issue 138. 
  4. ^ Awards won by The Bat!. Ritlabs.
  5. ^ Randall, Neil (November 2005). PC Magazine Windows XP Solutions, 2nd Edition, Wiley, 163. ISBN 0-471-74752-1. 
  6. ^ The Bat! Editor's review. CNET.
  7. ^ NotOptedIn (2002-07-30). "My error post about The Bat!". news.admin.net-abuse.email. (Web link). Retrieved on 2007-01-26.
  8. ^ Spam Guy (2006-06-08). "Use of "X-mailer: The Bat!" in spam". alt.spam. (Web link). Retrieved on 2007-01-26.
  9. ^ http://spamassassin.apache.org/full/2.6x/dist/rules/20_ratware.cf rules to detect forged The Bat! messages