i.Scribe 1.88 review
DownloadScribe is a small and fast email client with an intergrated contact database and calendar
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Scribe is a small and fast email client with an intergrated contact database and calendar. i.Scribe supports all the major internet mail protocols and uses international standards where possible.
Scribe doesn't required installing or uninstalled and can be used from a removable drive without reconfiguration. It comes with a highly accurate bayesian spam filter and translations to many different languages.
Updates are published regularly to respond to problems and to add features. Because Scribe runs on Windows, Linux and BeOS you can take your mail with you when you change operating system.
And don't worry about viruses, Scribe protects you from the usual security holes in other email clients with it's own virus safe HTML control and executable attachment lockout.
Here are some key features of "i Scribe":
Free or Commercial Email Client
i.Scribe is free for everyone to use. No time limits, no nagging shareware banners or number of trials. Use it to your hearts content. It is however limited to one account and one user defined filter. If you want to use more than one account and/or filter then there is the commercial version InScribe.
Spam Free
Scribe has a built in bayesian spam filter that learns what type of email you consider to be "junk". Once it has a hundred or so spam to train on it can start filtering incomming spam automatically. As your collection of spam increases so does the accuracy of the bayesian filter. Until it reaches a maximum of about 98.5%. All the while producing very few if any false positives (i.e. wrongly classified mail you actually want to see).
Small
Scribe is quite small, less than a MB to download. And even when downloaded takes up very little of your hard disk or memory while running. You can easily use Scribe from a portable drive like a USB flash card. The usually memory footprint is about 3-4 MB with a reasonable sized mail folder loaded. Great for those older machines that don't have gobs of RAM and HD.
Fast
Startup and shutdown are very quick. Typically taking only a second or two. Mail sends and receives go as fast as your net connection allows. No needless waiting around for things to happen (like Outlook). Because Scribe uses a flexible flat file format for mail storage you can move email with huge attachments around with no effort at all, unlike some email clients that have to copy the entire email, including attachment to another file on disk causing unnecessary waiting for the user.
Easy
Scribe comes totally self contained. You can either use the installer version or just unzip the distribution file. To uninstall either use the uninstaller in the Programs menu or delete the folder the email client was unzipped into. There's no dll's left lying around or registry settings to worry about. All the data and settings for scribe are stored in it's directory. This also makes it easy to back your email up.
Cross-platform
Scribe runs in Windows and Linux. Allowing users to maintain all their email and contacts in one place. Run the version of scribe for the OS your running and access the email received in another OS. There is a legacy BeOS version that may be able to read/write to a Scribe mail folder.
Up To Date
I've been releasing updates about once a month since the start of 1999. People email bug reports and feature requests in to me and where possible they get incorperated into an update. Releases are tagged "stable" or "unstable" to help you to pick a version suitable for your purposes. The unstable builds are public beta's for experienced users to test.
Expandable
Scribe has a plugin interface that allows people to expand the capabilities of the application. If anyone is interested in writing a plugin I can send you the libraries and documentation to do so. So far you can write plugins for 3rd party MIME type viewers, directory services and text handling utilities. In the future Scribe will support plugins for mail source/sink and mail storage. Which will mean that the very core of Scribe will be open to new ways of receiving, sending and storing email.
Safe
Scribe is not vunerable to email virus' like Klez and Bugbear because the HTML support is not provided by Internet Explorer but by a built in HTML control that has no scripting, network or execute capability. The attachment list won't hide the real extension of a file either, which typically used by virus' to trick the user into openning an executable when the user thought it was a document. And if a virus does get in through by some other means, it won't be able to find your address book thus preventing it from mailing itself to all your contacts. Finally Scribe won't let you open a file from the attachment list when it has an executable image (PE or ELF) or has a standard scripting exetension (like .VBS on windows). This prevents users accidently opening virii directly. If you have been sent a safe executable that you do need to run, then you can save it to disk and run it from there.
Interoperable
Scribe supports importing and exporting mail, contacts and calendar events to many open formats such as MBOX, .eml (single email), vCard, vCal/iCal and CSV (comma separated variables) contacts. Also support for proprietry formats and API's such as MAPI (import/export available only on windows), Outlook Express's MBX/DBX format and Eudora's address book is included. Scribe also has native support for converting winmail.dat attachments from Outlook user's into separate attachments that you can open or forward, which works even on Linux!
Multi-language
Scribe can be translated into any language.
English (en) [Native]
Farsi (fa) [Updated: v1.88-Final, 25/10/2005]
Vietnamese (vi) [Updated: v1.88-Final, 25/10/2005]
German (de) [Updated: v1.88-Test14, 30/9/2005]
Lithuanian (lt) [Updated: v1.88-Rc2, 9/5/2005]
Portuguese (pt) [Updated: v1.88-Test8, 23/3/2005]
Czech (cs) [Updated: v1.88-Test3, 6/1/2005]
Dutch (nl) [Updated: v1.87-Final, 21/12/2004]
Serbian (sr) [Updated: v1.87-Final, 21/12/2004]
Polish (pl) [Updated: v1.87-Final, 10/12/2004]
Norwegian (no) [Updated: v1.87-21, 2/8/2004]
Spanish (es) [Updated: v1.87-14, 28/4/2004]
Japanese (ja) [Added: v1.87-1, 1/1/2004]
Chinese Traditional (zh_tw) [Added: v1.87-1, 24/12/2003]
Russian (ru) [Added: v1.86, 14/2/2003]
Brazilian Portuguese (pt_br) [Added: v1.85, 20/11/2002]
French (fr) [Updated: v1.68, 5/7/2002]
Italian (it)
Under windows the langauge will be read from the regional settings but if you want to override that then go into the appearence options and you can select a language there. If you're using BeOS then you can setup a LGI Config File to set the language. The translations will become worse over time and new user interface components become available, which obviously won't have translations yet, so the version and date in the square brackets will give you some idea of how up to date the particular translation is. Also Scribe supports a wide array of character sets, especially when you install the iconv dll (see below). All the user interface allows unicode to be read and entered, although due to the lack of support in Windows 95/98/ME multi-byte charsets are not supported very well.
What's New in This Release:
Fixes a lot of issues with the IMAP(full) implementation.
Fixes behaviour of the enter key in the Contact's email entry field.
Fixes painting of multi-day events in the week view.
Various crash fixes.
Adds "DIGEST-MD5" auth method support to IMAP.
Fixes 24hr selection in the calendar event window.
Fixes printing month view calendars.
Adds filtering based on group membership.
Fixes the "CC" header not being sent.
Fixes mail recipients having their default address overwrite the actual address.
Adds support for minutes:seconds in the receive timeout field.
i.Scribe 1.88 keywords