What Do You Want In An Email Program?

[BabyGeniuses]

Speed?
Stability?
Ease of use?
Compatibility?

Is the ability to get email from HTTP providers a needed function?
IE. Netscape, Yahoo, Hotmail...

[MediaSlayer]

I would have that the most obvious one would be security but I could be dead wrong...

[BabyGeniuses]

So encryption is a must for you?

[Cl1mh4224rd]

That's only one fraction of the security he was referring to. Most people would prefer that their emails don't come with the possibility of wiping out their hard drives, if you know what I mean. ;)

[BabyGeniuses]

Well, the GUI would be in Visual Basic, but until my patience wore out, the actually connectivity applications for the various methods of email retrieval/sending would be in GNU C, with perhaps PERL when the mood strikes me as needing such a language. In fact, I may just scrap C and use PERL, it does work rather well for these things, and is very stable.

EDIT:
I'm a wee bit slow. Sorry. I see what you mean now. You'd prefer a program that doesn't come with one billion security holes...

[Bodasher]

One with out the security issues of a Windows OS. Bloody millions of 'em, those hotfixes!
Anyhoo, it would have to have a user friendly GUI, the possibility to make exciting emails (á la Incredimail), and have it not drain all the resources.

One improvement of Outlook XP would be so you were able to minimise it to the system tray, liek IncrediMail, so it could automatically d/l new emails without having to load the program again and again and again. Very annoying.

While we're on this topic, does HotBar contain ad/spyware? I want the email half of it you see.