Overview

IncrediMail Xe is an advertising-supported email client for the Microsoft Windows operating system by IncrediMail Ltd. that offers the ability to add e-mail backgrounds, Emoticons, Ecards, Sounds, Animations, and 3D effects from directly within the client. The program supports standard POP3 and IMAP4 mail protocols. HTML mail formatting is supported and heavily marketed as one of the program's strong points, as the profusion of graphic emoticons in the logo shown here makes clear. The program also includes advanced message filtering, an automatic spellchecker, and font style preferences.

Licensing

IncrediMail Xe is offered free of charge for an unlimited amount of time, but relies on various channels to generate income: the sale of extra products and services ; the sale of upgraded content within the IncrediMail Gold Gallery ; and advertisements displayed in the application, within the Website, and animated Incredimail advertisements at the bottom of outgoing email.

A premium version of Incredimail is available for purchase which removes the advertisements from both the program and the emails sent through it.

History

The concept of IncrediMail evolved in 1999, when one of IncrediMail's founders watched the movie “Mission: Impossible” and saw a graphically rich email program being used in the film. He began to search for such an email program only to discover that it didn't exist in the real world. Incredimail wasthereforeintended to represent the vision of “Incredible Email” as seen in the movies.

First released in Q2 2000, IncrediMail reached 1 million downloads in Q2 2001 . In March of 2001, IncrediMail released its first set of purchasable products. By the end of 2002, IncrediMail's aggressive "viral" marketing tactics helped it reach 10 million downloads. By 2004, 40 million downloads were passed with a rate of a million new downloads per month.

IncrediMail also collaborated with Yahoo! to offer IncrediMail Personals, Oberon Media to offer IncrediGames , and Babylon (program) to offer automated translation. In January 2006, IncrediMail Ltd. entered the public market in New York (NASDAQ: MAIL).

Languages/Lingual support

The IncrediMail email client is offered in 12 languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Chinese Traditional, Chinese Simplified, and Japanese

Features

Features included within IncrediMail's basic version (available free of charge) are Emoticons, email Backgrounds, Ecards, Sounds, Animations, 3D effects, advanced message filtering, and email notifiers. Many spam filtering techniques are offered, and a specific focus seems to be made on features that users request frequently (easy blocking of senders by name, easy sending of rejection messages from the client).

However, it is worth noting that while these are frequently requested features by end-users frustrated with spam, they do more to make the user feel empowered than to actually combat spam - in particular, "noisy" rejection of incoming messages is considered a very bad idea as it rarely does anything but abuse innocent third parties (see Backscatter).

Incredimail also supports the current industry standard filtering features such as automatic image blocking and creation of message rules. A subscription-based spam filtering system is also available at an extra recurring charge.

Controversy - technical

There is much controversy over the usability and viability of HTML email in general. Due to its heavy and very visible use of HTML formatting in its default out-of-box configuration, Incredimail finds itself at the forefront of this controversy as what many of the detractors of HTML email consider an extreme "worst-case example" and many of the proponents consider "fun and friendly."

Some argue that the program increases message sizes (and consequently download times for recipients) and uses more bandwidth than text-only or HTML mail. In addition, the (default) heavy use of HTML and embedded images in Incredimail is difficult to tell from spam in automated filters; at times high-profile pump-and-dump penny-stock spammers have used this similarity to sneak their payloads through those automated filters. Preferences within the program can be set, however, to send mail in a plain-text format.

In addition, Incredimail makes extensive use of the registry and system directories which is not properly rolled back with its uninstallation script. This has frequently required manual registry edits to fix the damage if a user decided later to remove the program.

Controversy - legal

Finally there has been a good deal of controversy over the privacy policy of the company which produces Incredimail. The program collects data such as how many emails are sent, how many pictures are sent in those emails, dates and times the user has the program open, and more.

Verbiage from the EULA Incredimail users must accept in order to install the program is also a source of controversy, as this EULA provision at one time specifically granted the Incredimail corporation "an unrestricted, perpetual, irrevocable license to use, reproduce, display, perform, modify, transmit and distribute" any email sent using the program itself. This text has since been modified to restrict these rights grants more reasonably to unsolicited email sent to the Incredimail corporation, however.

Further controversy over potential security issues within the Incredimail client and service seem born out by the "Risks" clause in the current EULA, however, which includes very forbidding (and unusual in an email client, see the Thunderbird EULA for a contrasting example) text about "hacking, cracking, nuking," and more:

Unfortunately the EULA for Incredimail is not available online at this time, and so can only be readily viewed by downloading the actual program and beginning the installation process.