CheckMail

Electronic mail is now one of the most commonly used communication methods worldwide. As such, an abundance of services started to flourish and make a name for themselves. With the help of desktop applications like CheckMail you can stay connected to the one you prefer, receive and send messages, as well as automate a few tasks.

In terms of design, elements are kept pretty simple and make the interface intuitive. Most space is dedicated to displaying your emails along with related details like sender, subject, date, size and more, while a side panel lets you manage account folders.

A few minutes in and you might notice the application is a little raw. However, this is an advantage since customization is a strong feature. Little presets are available so you need to manually provide all details when it comes to profiles, folders, filters and schedulers.

A neat advantage is that you can create multiple provides that use different services and monitor all of them. All you need is to provide the proper POP3 server settings and credentials, both for incoming and outgoing mails. The application can be used on a server, making it suitable for office environments.

However, short fused individuals might look away because of too much customization. The application doesn't automatically check accounts unless you create such a rule, which is slightly disturbing. On the other hand, doing so is pretty easy, with a simple window fitted with tabs for conditions and actions that trigger as a result. The same can be said about the integrated scheduler, which is mainly used to make the application check for new mails.

Needless to say that you can open up any mail in your inbox. Sadly, content is displayed in basic text format, so any images or clips contained are not visible. What's more, attachments cannot be processed in the sense that there's no option to upload or download them, which cuts a great deal of practicality.

CheckMail comes equipped with a good set of ideas, but overall implementation leaves a lot more to be desired. A considerable amount of time needs to be spent configuring your profiles, actions and schedules, which also needs a lot of testing for proper functionality. It can be used with any POP3 service or even on a server, but only with more work will it become entirely practical.