Possible e-mail alternative for 7
http://www.pmail.com/overviews/ovw_winpmail.htm
"Pegasus Mail is an e-mail client that runs on computers using Microsoft Windows: by client, we mean that it interacts directly with the user, allowing mail to be sent, read, filed, printed and otherwise manipulated through a graphical interface. Probably one of the most feature-rich mail clients available, most users say that they find the program easy to use despite its richness. Small and fast, Pegasus Mail can be left running permanently on the workstation and includes powerful tools to notify the user when new mail arrives."
http://www.pmail.com/history.htm
"By the standards of the ever-changing Internet, Pegasus Mail has a long history: it sent its first message in December 1989, and has been made available as a free service to the Internet since February 1990. The Windows version of Pegasus Mail first appeared in 1993, as did the first version of Mercury, my mail server. In the time since its initial release, Pegasus Mail has sent billions of messages for millions of people. It dates from the time when the Internet was a community rather than just a highway - a time when people helped each other without worrying too much about who was going to pay for it.
My name is David Harris - I'm the person who develops both Pegasus Mail and Mercury. There is no anonymous corporation behind the program, and the same pair of hands that wrote the first version in 1989 is still writing it in the year 2002. People regularly ask me why I originally wrote these programs, and why I still make them available for free: if you've got a moment, I'll try to give you a little background.
In 1989, the University where I worked (in Dunedin, New Zealand) installed its first Novell NetWare network. It wasn't until after we installed it that we found that it didn't include an e-mail system, but we'd already used up our budget and the commercial mail packages that were available were very expensive. To fill the gap, I wrote a simple e-mail program in my own time and made it available on the network: I was quite surprised to find that people liked it.
Early in 1990, after tidying it up a little, I made it available on the Internet at a friend's FTP site in Hawaii, expecting that four or five other sites might find a use for it... In the first week of availability, it was downloaded more than 100 times, which also surprised me. I found that I was receiving mail from people thanking me for giving them something they couldn't have afforded any other way -- communication. I grew to understand that communication had to be regarded as a right, not as a privilege: it seemed to me in 1989, as it still seems to me now, that freedom of speech is useless if nobody can hear you. Giving away Pegasus Mail seemed to be a means by which I could try to make communication more accessible to a much wider range of people who needed it - it was, if you like, my attempt to level the playing field a little, to remove some of the power from the faceless corporate giants who saw profit as the only possible end to enterprise."
Sounds like a facinating program. Must be pretty usable as it has been on the go since 1989. Think I'll give it a go when I do me 7 install.