The Bat!
Encyclopedia
The Bat! is a shareware
e-mail client
for the Microsoft Windows
operating system
, developed by RITLabs, a company based in Chişinău
, Moldova
.
, Pegasus Mail
and several browser-integrated e-mail clients as a less virus
-prone replacement
for Microsoft Outlook Express
. It is well respected within the computer
industry, and has won a number of awards. The user interface
of The Bat! has a high level of available customization. It has powerful message filtering capabilities. It also supports templates, allowing three different levels of template creation. This along with macros allows for extensive automation of almost every aspect of mailing.
s, sites and organizations claim that The Bat! is a spamming tool and, on that basis, block messages containing "The Bat!" in the X-Mailer header. Many spam messages do 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. This forces legitimate users to configure The Bat! not to include the X-Mailer field in 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.
Shareware
The term shareware is a proprietary software that is provided to users without payment on a trial basis and is often limited by any combination of functionality, availability, or convenience. Shareware is often offered as a download from an Internet website or as a compact disc included with a...
e-mail client
E-mail client
An email client, email reader, or more formally mail user agent , is a computer program used to manage a user's email.The term can refer to any system capable of accessing the user's email mailbox, regardless of it being a mail user agent, a relaying server, or a human typing on a terminal...
for the Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
, developed by RITLabs, a company based in Chişinău
Chisinau
Chișinău is the capital and largest municipality of Moldova. It is also its main industrial and commercial centre and is located in the middle of the country, on the river Bîc...
, Moldova
Moldova
Moldova , officially the Republic of Moldova is a landlocked state in Eastern Europe, located between Romania to the West and Ukraine to the North, East and South. It declared itself an independent state with the same boundaries as the preceding Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1991, as part...
.
History
- 1.0 Beta, the first public version, was released in March 1997. It supported folders, filtering, viewing HTMLHTMLHyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....
e-mail without the need to have Internet ExplorerInternet ExplorerWindows Internet Explorer is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, starting in 1995. It was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 that year...
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 engineLayout engineA web browser engine, , is a software component that takes marked up content and formatting information and displays the formatted content on the screen. It "paints" on the content area of a window, which is displayed on a monitor or a printer...
on 27 April 2000. 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 ExpressOutlook ExpressOutlook Express is an email and news client that is included with Internet Explorer versions 4.0 through 6.0. As such, it is also bundled with several versions of Microsoft Windows, from Windows 98 to Windows Server 2003, and is available for Windows 3.x, Windows NT 3.51, Windows 95 and Mac OS 9...
- Version 3.0 (September 2004) introduced customizable User Interface, virtual folderVirtual folderIn computing, a virtual folder generally denotes an organizing principle for files that is not dependent on location in a hierarchical directory tree...
s, Mail Chat, Biometric authenticationAuthenticationAuthentication is the act of confirming the truth of an attribute of a datum or entity...
and support of MAPI protocol to connect to Microsoft ExchangeMicrosoft Exchange ServerMicrosoft Exchange Server is the server side of a client–server, collaborative application product developed by Microsoft. It is part of the Microsoft Servers line of server products and is used by enterprises using Microsoft infrastructure products...
Servers. - Version 3.95 (December 2006) supports IPv6IPv6Internet Protocol version 6 is a version of the Internet Protocol . It is designed to succeed the Internet Protocol version 4...
. - 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 UnicodeUnicodeUnicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
, internal image viewer supports rotate, advanced resize and zoom algorithms and full screen mode. - Version 4.1 (December 2008) adds HTML templates, support for SOCKSSOCKSSOCKS is an Internet protocol that routes network packets between a client and server through a proxy server. SOCKS5 additionally provides authentication so only authorized users may access a server...
proxy, and a new mail database format that allows for an unlimited volume of mail. - Version 4.2 (June 2009) adds postponed sending.
- Version 5.0 (April 2011) improves support for IMAP protocol, hints, folder information html templates, image downloader, odd/even row contrast.
Market position
In the marketplace it competes with EudoraEudora (e-mail client)
Eudora is an e-mail client used on the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows operating systems. It also supports several palmtop computing platforms, including Newton and the Palm OS....
, Pegasus Mail
Pegasus Mail
Pegasus Mail is a donationware , proprietary, email client that is developed and maintained by David Harris and his team. It was originally released in 1990 for internal and external mail on Netware networks with MS-DOS clients, and was subsequently ported to Microsoft Windows...
and several browser-integrated e-mail clients as a less virus
Computer virus
A computer virus is a computer program that can replicate itself and spread from one computer to another. The term "virus" is also commonly but erroneously used to refer to other types of malware, including but not limited to adware and spyware programs that do not have the reproductive ability...
-prone replacement
for Microsoft Outlook Express
Outlook Express
Outlook Express is an email and news client that is included with Internet Explorer versions 4.0 through 6.0. As such, it is also bundled with several versions of Microsoft Windows, from Windows 98 to Windows Server 2003, and is available for Windows 3.x, Windows NT 3.51, Windows 95 and Mac OS 9...
. It is well respected within the computer
Computer
A computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...
industry, and has won a number of awards. The user interface
User interface
The user interface, in the industrial design field of human–machine interaction, is the space where interaction between humans and machines occurs. The goal of interaction between a human and a machine at the user interface is effective operation and control of the machine, and feedback from the...
of The Bat! has a high level of available customization. It has powerful message filtering capabilities. It also supports templates, allowing three different levels of template creation. This along with macros allows for extensive automation of almost every aspect of mailing.
Forged headers
A number of Internet service providerInternet service provider
An Internet service provider is a company that provides access to the Internet. Access ISPs directly connect customers to the Internet using copper wires, wireless or fiber-optic connections. Hosting ISPs lease server space for smaller businesses and host other people servers...
s, sites and organizations claim that The Bat! is a spamming tool and, on that basis, block messages containing "The Bat!" in the X-Mailer header. Many spam messages do 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. This forces legitimate users to configure The Bat! not to include the X-Mailer field in the messages that they send.
Programs such as SpamAssassin
SpamAssassin
SpamAssassin is a computer program released under the Apache License 2.0 used for e-mail spam filtering based on content-matching rules. It is now part of the Apache Foundation....
can detect many instances of forged "X-Mailer: The Bat!" headers by looking at other parts of the message, for example HTML
HTML
HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....
body, message-id, charset and boundary information.