Koma-Mail: An email client that runs from your flash drive

Posted on January 21, 2008 at 6:34 am

Employers are, more and more, rightly protecting their IT assets by restricting what employees can and cannot do with their work computers. I’ve seen firsthand what havoc can be wrought upon unprotected systems by clueless workers who download and install the worst possible malware with the pure innocence of wind-driven snow.

So I do not fault IT departments when I find that I cannot add the applications I find most useful to my workstation. But there is a way to run those applications without installing them on your employer’s (or anyone else’s) system or in any way leaving a mark on it whatsoever.

You’ve already heard about Portable Apps on this web site, a program that installs on your flash/stick/thumb drive and lets you add scores of useful applications, but here’s a very handy portable email client application you may never have heard of: Koma-Mail.

When you run Kona-Mail from your flash drive, nothing is installed or changed on the computer itself, so your IT guys have nothing to worry about. In the mean time however, you get to set up Koma-Mail to receive and send email from as many POP3 and IMAP accounts as you like.

Koma-Mail has some other very cool features, such as: the ability to encrypt your account to keep your email data from prying eyes; spam filters that let you filter out spam two different ways (word-based or Bayesian); send and receive email through POP3 or IMAP accounts; an integrated RSS viewer. Here’s a list of even more stuff that Kona-Mail has:

POP3, IMAP, SMTP, WebDav
SSL and APOP support
RSS viewer
Calendar
Contact management
Displays HTML Mail
HTML-Editor for composing
Sends and receives mail with inline images
Zips attachments automatically
Mail can be marked with colors
Free folder structure
Automatically cleans folders
Template module
Several user accounts
Several mail accounts per user account
Encrypts user accounts
Spam filter (including Bayesian)
Filter module
Unicode support
Available in 17 languages

So if you’re looking for a really thin email client that requires no installation and will run from a USB stick on any computer, definitely check out Koma-Mail!

This is a guest post written by Barry Mahfood from Barry’s Best Computer Tips.

Technorati Tags: koma mail, email from usb stick, email client, free email client, portable email client, flash drive email client

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2 Responses to “Koma-Mail: An email client that runs from your flash drive”

Karen said on : January 22nd, 2008 at 4:12 am

Great article Barry. This application will not only be useful to a people who use work computers. Like you say it prevents malware being downloaded. However at my daughters workplace they have something installed in their systems to prevent people using flash drives incase they are downloading sensitive information.

EssentialPIM - Portable USB address book, contact manager, calendar, and notes Says:

[...] If you’re looking for more cool applications to run from your USB drive, check out Koma-Mail, a portable email client or PortableScibus, a powerful and free desktop publishing [...]
February 20th, 2008 at 10:48 am