Is it worth the money? Postbox 5 email client
Postbox 5 promises to let you sift and sort your emails in more ways than you thought possible. Mike Plant unleashes it on his jam-packed inbox
Postbox 5 Format: Windows 7, 8/8.1 or 10 Website: www.postbox-inc.com ‘Launch’ price: £28.80 (normally £36) Free trial period: 30 days
What do we really need from a program that looks after our emails? A place to keep and file them, a means to reply, a contacts list, and some kind of filter that blocks spam messages. Besides these basic requirements any other tools are just unnecessary filler, aren’t they?
That’s what I always thought anyway, but email client Postbox 5 went all out to make me reconsider my low expectations, with a bewildering array of options for filtering and categorising emails. These are intended to make it easier to search for emails.
Bleak Outlook
Setting up Postbox 5 is relatively straightforward. Simply enter your principal email address and password (the program supports all the popular email services, including Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook.com/hotmail). Once it has your account details it will work out the complicated IMAP or POP3 settings for your account.
If you’re adding a Gmail account, make sure you enable IMAP support in Gmail’s settings first. To do that, open your Gmail account, click the Settings button (the cog in the top right), then click Settings, click the ‘Forwarding and POP/IMAP’ tab and make sure Enable IMAP is selected (see screenshot above right). Click Save Changes to apply the setting.
This was easy enough to do, but the lack of support for Microsoft’s Exchange Server was disappointing. If you use an Outlook account, you probably also have an Exchange Server account that can share your contacts across email clients, and even your tablet and phone (see Issue 481, page 58). No support meant I had to add my contacts by importing a CSV text file (click Tools, Address Book, Tools and Import to add yours). Most email services will export CSV files, but any new contacts you add to Postbox won’t be automatically synced with your Outlook contact lists, which makes for a lot of extra work.
Staying focused
Once I got it up and running, Postbox did add a degree of email organisation that I’d previously aspired to, but never got around to. Most email clients let you arrange emails in categorised folders, but Postbox goes one step further by adding emails to Topics (which actually work pretty much like folders). You can then create favourite Topics and Contacts to help you stay on top of your most important messages.
The Focus Pane (see screenshot below) adds even more control. Click View,
Show, then Focus Pane to see it, then click any of the default filters to see just the emails you want. For example, to see the emails I’d received today that I’d yet to open, I clicked Unread, held down the Shift key and clicked Today (much like how you’d select multiple folders in Windows). These filters and search tools are handy, but there’s little else here that Gmail, or even Outlook, don’t also have – it’s just packaged differently.