There are some pretty good free Webmail email services, but being on a dailup connection, I don't like the slowness of using any Webmail service. POP3 offers a clearly superior email experience for dialup users. But what if you could check your inbox on Web-only email services with a POP3 client?

FreePOPs is a freeware stand-between program. It acts as the liaison between your email client and your free webmail service provider (like Yahoo!, HotMail, GMail). It's a POP3 daemon plus a LUA interpreter and some extra libraries for HTTP and HTML parsing. Its main purpose is translating local POP3 requests to remote HTTP actions on supported webmail services, but there is also a plugin to read news from a website as if it were mail in a mailbox.

FreePOPs is an easily extensible program, which allows access to the most varied resources through the POP3 protocol. You can extend FreePOPs on the fly, without even restarting it; add a plugin or modify an existing one simply changing the script file since the plugins are written in LUA and are interpreted on the fly.

FreePOPs author Pier Luigi Covarelli suggests FreePOPs can be useful if:
* You are behind a firewall that closes the 110 port but you need to read your mail and the web-mail of your mail provider sucks.
* Your mail provider does not allow you to access your mailbox with POP3 protocol, but only through the web-mail service.
* You prefer looking at your mailbox instead of browsing some websites news.
* You have to develop a pop3 server in less than a week and you want it to be reasonably fast and not so memory consuming.
* You are not a C hacker, but you want to benefit from a fast POP3 server frontend written in C and you want not to loose a month in writing the backend in C. LUA is a really simple and tiny language, one week is enough to learn it in a way that allows you to use it productively.

MacFreePOPs includes the binary version of FreePOPs compiled for Mac OS X (10.2 or later) and allow to use it with an pure Acqua-style user interface (in short is a GUI to FreePOPs

FreePOPs Main features include:
- Integration with the Dock and Menu-bar
- Starting, stopping ad monitoring of freepopsd server
- Set-up of all communication parameters
- Options for auto-start, auto-stop and auto-restart on crash.
- Real-time visualization of log file
- Automated check ad download of newer version
- Gives detailed plug-ins information

More FreePOPs features:
* POP3 server RFC compliant (not full featured but compliant).
* Portable (written in C and LUA that is written in C, so everything is written in the most portable language around the world).
* Small (in the sense of resources usage) and reasonably fast.
* Extremely extensible on the fly using a simple and power ful language.
* Pretty documented.
* Released under the GNU/GPL license (this means FreePOPs is Free Software).

Plugin patches are available for Juno, Hotmail, Gmail, Browser, Updater, Libero, Tin, Yahoo, Mailcom, and AOL. You can download the latest plugin patches here:
http://www.freepops.org/en/

Latest update info here:
http://www.freepops.org/en/news.php

A complete list of plugin modules is here:
http://freepops.sourceforge.net/en/viewplugins.php

FreePOPs works with these Mac email clients (and probably others that support POP 3 custom port configuration):
• Outlook Express
• Eudora 6
• Mozilla & Thunderbird
• Opera

Unfortunately FreePOPs doesn't have any support for SMTP servers, so you can't send mail using FreePOPs, but have to depend on your ISP's SMTP server or another SMTP server.

The FreePOPs application window has a button for starting/stopping the freepopsd server, and three tabbed panes for setting preferences and plug-in info.

To configure your email client you must change the POP3 server settings. Usually you must use localhost as the pop3 host name, and 2000 as the pop3 port. If you install FreePOPs in another computer of your LAN, you should use the host's name instead of localhost. You must use a full email address as username, for example instead of only something. This is because FreePOPs chooses the plugin to load by looking at your username.

There are tutorials on the FreePOPs Website that walk you through configuring the above listed email clients. There is also an English PDF user manual (also available in HTML format) and a tutorial for dummies on how to set up your mail client that can be downloaded here:
http://freepops.sourceforge.net/en/doc.shtml

I tried FreePOPs first with Eudora, which is my main email application. I set up a Gmail email account in Eudora entered 127.0.0.1 (FreePOPs) as the incoming email server, and then changed the POP3 Port from 110 to 2000 in the Settings Ports & Protocols panel.

I hit the check mail button, entered my Gmail password, and waited to see what would happen. "Waited" is the operative word here. It took quite a while (maybe 30-45 seconds) for FreePOP to connect with Gmail, but when it did, the contents of my inbox downloaded normally.

The problem was that the POP3 port configuration in Eudora is global, and none of my other email accounts would work with Port 2000 configured. They want Port 110. Bummer. Fine if Gmail is your only email account. I have 15 email accounts configured in Eudora.

I also tried Opera's email client, and it supports individual port configurations for each account, so would be a workable workaround. I'm not sure about this issue in Mozilla/Thunderbird or other compatible POP 3 clients.

The FreePOPs Cocoa drawer displays information about the plug-in you're using.

There is also a menulet that can optionally be displayed in the menu bar.

New in version 1.6:
- Includes FreePOPs 0.0.97
- Improved the on-line update system to handle freepopsd versions 0.0.97 or later.

System requirements:
MacOS X 10.2 or later

MacFreePOPs is freeware/donationware

For more information, visit:
http://www.open-link.it/macfreepops/index1_en.html

Download:
http://www.open-link.it/macfreepops/downloads/MacFreePOPs_EN.dmg

Plugin info here:
http://freepops.sourceforge.net/en/viewplugins.php

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Charles W. Moore