FreePOPs

Infobox Software
name = FreePOPs



caption =
author = Caprari, Cocchiaro, Schwager, Tassi, and Vellei
developer =
released = 30 April, 2004
latest release version = 0.2.6
latest release date = 17 November, 2007
latest preview version =
latest preview date =
operating system = Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, BeOS
platform = Cross-platform
language = C, Lua
genre = E-mail
license = GNU General Public License
website = [http://www.freepops.org FreePOPs.org]

FreePOPs is an extensible mail proxy. Its primary use is to allow checking and downloading of e-mail from webmails from any conventional POP3 client program, avoiding the need to use a Web browser. It can also be used as an aggregator for RSS feeds and more.

This application retrieves all your messages from various accounts (e.g. Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, AOL …) without manual login through an http page.

FreePOPs

FreePOPs is a POP3 daemon with a Lua interpreter and some extra libraries for HTTP and HTML parsing. Its main purpose is translating local POP3 requests (from a local e-mail client for example) to remote HTTP actions on the supported webmails, but it is more flexible than that. For example, a plugin is available that allows receiving news from a website as if they were e-mail messages in a mailbox. FreePOPs can be extended on the fly: plugins can be added or existing ones can be modified by simply changing the relevant script file.

The software is supported by a very active user forum - see below.

FreePOPs is a very useful way of dealing with a webmail as though it were a regular POP3 mailbox. Most webmail providers require you to use a web browser to read and collect your mail. This process can be slow and any mail software client coupled with FreePOPs can do this in the background effectively; for this purpose, FreePOPs can be combined with programs such as PopTray, getmail or Mozilla Thunderbird, to allow scheduled checking of both POP3 mailboxes and webmails in the background.

FreePOPs is Free Software, being released under the GNU GPL License.

Operating systems

FreePOPs is available on most consumer operating systems, whether included in official software distributions (as is the case with Linux), or in the form of installer packages provided by developers or users.

Usage

Normally you use an E-mail client application (such as Microsoft Outlook) to get your email from your service provider. If your service provider is telecomxxx.com, then your email address is something like [e-mail]. However you may have an email account with other free webmail services. To retrieve emails sent to one free webmail service you connect to their server and log into your account. FreePOPs automatically retrieves all of your emails from each account.

External links

* Main site - http://www.freepops.org/
* User forum - http://freepops.diludovico.it/
* Unofficial graphical front-end for Mac OS X - http://www.e-link.it/macfreepops/