The Bat!
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| The Bat! | |
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| Developer: | RitLabs |
|---|---|
| Latest release: | 3.95.06 / December 27, 2006 |
| OS: | Windows |
| Use: | E-mail client |
| License: | shareware |
| Website: | www.ritlabs.com/en/products/thebat/ |
The Bat! is an e-mail client for the Microsoft Windows operating system.
The Bat! is developed by RitLabs (Stefan Tanurkov, Maxim Masiutin, Diman Pavlov, Valerye Bostan, Valera Hiora), a company based in Chişinău, Moldova.
The Bat! is distributed as shareware.
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 in March 1998.
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.
[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! is intuitive[5], with the high level of available customization. It has extremely powerful message filtering capabilities[6]. 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 [7].
[edit] Forged headers
A number of Internet service providers[8], sites and organisations[9] are claiming that The Bat! is a spamming tool and, on that basis, are blocking messages containing "The Bat!" in an x-mailer header.
Many spam messages have the X-Mailer header field set to The Bat!, but this because it is one of the default settings in the Advanced Mass Sender program, which is frequently used for sending spam mail.
There may be about 30 messages with forged "X-Mailer: The Bat!" headers per 1000 spam messages. Some Internet service providers, being unaware of this, are setting 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.
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. Here is a link to a file containing the rules to detect forged The Bat! messages: http://spamassassin.apache.org/full/2.6x/dist/rules/20_ratware.cf
[edit] See also
[edit] External link
[edit] References
- ^ Gaskin, James. Broadband Bible. Wiley, 144. ISBN 0-7645-6951-1.
- ^ Kraynak, Joe. Top 100 Simplified Tips & Tricks, 133. ISBN 0-7645-7474-4.
- ^ Winder, Davey. "Product Reviews: The Bat! 3.6 Professional", PC Pro Magazine, Issue 138.
- ^ Awards won by The Bat!. Ritlabs.
- ^ Gennick, Jonathan (May 2003). The Bat! - O'Reilly Databases.
- ^ Randall, Neil (November 2005). PC Magazine Windows XP Solutions, 2nd Edition, Wiley, 163. ISBN 0-471-74752-1.
- ^ The Bat! Editor's review. CNET.
- ^ NotOptedIn (2002-07-30). "My error post about The Bat!". news.admin.net-abuse.email. (Google Groups). Retrieved on 2007-01-26.
- ^ Spam Guy (2006-06-08). "Use of "X-mailer: The Bat!" in spam". alt.spam. (Google Groups). Retrieved on 2007-01-26.
