It may not be a big deal for some people, but me? Oh yeah, it’s been a BIG deal! I have used PopTray for years and have loved it. Well, when I bought my laptop, it had Vista Home Premium already installed and the latest version of Poptray would NOT work past the very first email entered (I need for it to check about 15 accounts, not just one!!)
We all need something to screen our email BEFORE it ever reaches our computers, and PopTray is FREE and it does the job beautifully! The link I’ve included in this paragraph is for the version before the latest one and it is the version that WORKS WITH VISTA!! That’s why I put the download link in this article for you - to save you all the hours and hours of searching, downloading other stuff, etc, trying to find something akin to my beloved software that had worked so perfectly with XP Pro.
Over the past week, I have downloaded and installed about five different programs (not one was easy or intuitive like PT is) and uninstalled every one of them within a half hour or less. I was at the end of my rope, and it hit me tonight… hey, the older 3.1 version worked on XP, so it’s worth a shot… and lo, and behold, it installed flawlessly right over the newer one and started working immediately using the config file I had used on the old computer that died. So it saved a ton of time reconfiguring, since it was already done many many moons ago!
The newest version (v. 3.2) had the strangest thing happen on my Vista machine - I was inputting my multiple email addresses (which in itself is a P.I.T.A. because I don’t have a list made up and it refused to use the old config file, so I was using another program to find all the user ids and passwords etc.
That took ‘forever’ and it checked the mail fine that first day, but then after I had shut down for the night, VIsta went into the PopTray config file and screwed it up so NONE of the emails I had input the day before, except for one would even appear in the top bar that had been full…. which I found to be super weird.
So then, I had the bright idea of copying the old config file over to the newer OS, and that was a pretty dumb idea… cuz it didn’t work at all AND Vista changed it right back to it’s own version AGAIN which also didn’t work beyond the first email on the list. Needless to say, that I wasn’t having fun with my new machine when it seemed nothing would work like it’s supposed to…
So, naturally, I had assumed that PopTray simply wouldn’t work with Vista. Until today (over a week later and lots of hunting for something to replace it, etc) when it hit me like a ton of bricks… why not use an earlier version, and that’s what I did. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?
What a bunch of wasted time I spent dealing with this important issue, so hopefully, some of you flustered Vista users will benefit from my struggle and not have to go thru it to get the best email and spam filter around.
PopTray is totally amazing and it checks up to twenty accounts for you, and you can delete the SPAM nasties, and the other obnoxious unsolicited junk right off the server without ever downloading a thing to your hard drive. It is like having a brilliant secretary without the extra payroll. It also has a blacklist and a whitelist, and a rules list, and more.
So… if you haven’t tried this free software, I would suggest that you do… it’s a godsend and even comes in other languages… and it may save your computer some day by not allowing downloading your email until YOU push the button in your email proggie after reviewing the incoming stuff, deleting suspicious emails and creating new filtering rules as needed.
I might add further that MailWasher Pro (another very much used software program I had on my XP machine) simply will not download mail from the server within Vista’s environment - it worked flawlessly in XP but just doesn’t play nice with Vista and is now useless to me (and it was the paid-for version).
Namaste,
Donna
