E-Checker

	"E-Checker"
	Version 1.55

a C-Sharp program, written by Robert English, designed to let you preview and/or delete e-mail before you download it to your regular e-mail program.

Introduction

In the early days of my internet experience, "spam" (unwanted junk mail) was not that big of a deal. The last few years have seen an exponential increase in this unwanted communication, sometimes as many as 100 a day, but the added "wild card" of computer viruses sent by email had me looking for a way to deal with this problem at its apparent source - the email server.

I wrote this program because I wanted to be able to see "in advance" what emails were waiting for me on the server. Then I could simply delete the unwanted ones before I used my normal email program to download the rest. This program is the ongoing result of my efforts in that direction. Currently, I use it every day and when I find a bug in the program I re-write the code. This one, available for download, is the latest version.

Features

You can do these things with the current version of "E-Checker":

View the number, size, sender, and subject of each e-mail waiting on your POP3 server.
Select one e-mail at a time to preview, up to 250 lines of it including the headers, and print a copy of it if you wish.
Select multipe e-mails to delete, from one to all of them, without having to preview any of them. You can then use your regular e-mail program to download and save what remains.
Automatic checking allows the program to sit in the taskbar and check your e-mail server every few minutes (you tell it how much time to wait between checks), or you can run it in default "manual mode" and it will only check when you tell it to.
For those with IMAP accounts - allows you to find out if you have mail waiting on the server or not.

Requirements:

Your computer system must have the following:

Microsoft Windows 98, NT4, or higher.
Microsoft .NET Runtime Environment 1.0 or higher (available for download
through Microsoft's "Windows Update" site).
Microsoft MSI Installer (available for download:
versions for Windows98 or Millenium,
and for NT4 or 2000 or XP).
WinZip, to unzip the executables you may download from this site.

Other systems, such as Linux, that may have a downloadable .NET Runtime Environment available (the "Mono" project looks promising) can eventually use this program. Currently, however, it is limited to the Microsoft platform.

Warnings

You may download this program free of charge, and use it as you wish, but be advised that this program comes with no warranties or guarantees of any sort. Any use you make of this program is at your own risk.

Download

E-Checker

History of the Program

"E-Checker" is an expansion upon a program written by Levent Camlibel (Ph.D. student at Clemson University, South Carolina) called "EMailNotifier" - a program posted on the "C-Sharp Corner" web site in November of 2001. His program displayed a box telling you how many e-mails you had on your server. As I used his publically-posted source code for the "nugget" of my program, refining what was already in public domain, I am following his example and making my program "freeware". I also herewith express my thanks to him for having posted this simple and elegant example in the first place.

My first version of this program, which allowed the user to view the contents of a POP server and delete one message at a time, was written in July of 2002 - it served as a "final project" for a .NET course I was taking at my University, as well as being something that I needed to help me deal with the large number of viruses in circulation. I have used it heavily since then, not only to delete suspected virus-laden e-mails but also to nuke junk e-mail ("spam") off the server. That has given me no small measure of satisfaction.

The first versions of my program worked only with POP3 servers, and stayed that way until my alma mater changed its e-mail server to IMAP. Version 1.50 was the first to include the option of checking email through an IMAP server. Currently it will only tell you whether you have e-mail on the server and how many there are. It will not yet allow you to look at the IMAP server's contents or delete any of the e-mails. I plan to include this functionality in a later version of the program.

I've made several corrections and improvements from then until now. This most recent version adds features and bug fixes from version 1.54:

The program would sometimes hang when the computer's connection to the internet was marginal, and could only be killed through "task manager". That bug has been found and corrected.
The email window would not refresh under certain circumstances. That bug has been found and corrected.
"Nag box", telling user that the email was deleted, was not retained for this most recent version. The nag box no longer appears after a successful delete.
New button placed on the email window allows for a manual refresh of the email server contents.
Date of email now shows in email window (after the "subject").

One user in Germany, who posted his comment to the "essential freebies" newsgroup, had problems with the program hanging when using it in IMAP mode. While the early versions had occasional problems with that, I have not been able to duplicate this problem with the newer version. So, in the absence of new data, I consider this problem corrected.

I hope you will enjoy the program as much as I have enjoyed using and writing it. If you have positive comments to share, or constructive criticism (no flames please), feel free to drop me an e-mail.