Looking at some of the reviews.
I think some of the issue have been addressed.
The lack of documentation is an issue just takes more time to figure some things out,
as a long time user of Thunderbird! with its quirks ,I prefer this so much more.
works flawlessly for me..on xp vista 7 and portable

Doesn't work for Russian mail servers, for example Yandex. Cyrillic characters are not displayed correctly.

I tried DreamMail today but was surprised to get UAC warnings whenever I compose new mail. Back to Sylpheed for me!

I've been trying out dreamMail again trying to prepare for Win7 but it ask recipients to download the chinese language pack even if I change the coding in the format menu of a new email.

Agreed with carbonize's statements. Very cool mail client and very promising.

@nedmech - There's still quite a bit needs translating. As to Format -> Code I think Dreammail needs some work when it comes to Windows 7. I just see a huge list all saying the same dll with a different number at the end.

The whole fast reply issue is down to the default Fast Reply template not having been translated yet.

Useless when the recipient and user needs the Chinese language pack. Heck that's even worse than claimed portable applications that store a value on the host system.

@carbonize - thanks for the link. I did try that already, but wasn't able to find any kind of release notes indicating what had changed or been fixed in each version.

Also, I believe the default installed settings use Chinese as the default encoding. There used to be a problem with it that no matter what encoding you chose, it always sent mail out as Chinese encoding. That seems to be fixed now. You probably just need to change the default encoding to Western or Unicode. There is a box in the status bar at the bottom that you can click on when composing/replying to change the encoding settings. Also available under the menu "Format -> Code". Home that helps a bit.

OK just played around with this and have to say it is a very well written program. Wish Thunderbird had some of the features this program has such as Quick Reply and the tabs for quickly viewing HTML/Text/Headers/Source of an email.

The bad news was that I could not reply nor compose a new email. Fast Reply worked but there was a lot of Chinese in the reply.

[%收件人名称]，你好

Just testing quick reply.

[%发件人名称]，[%发件人地址]
[%当前日期]

----- Original Message -----
From: [%原邮件发件人名称]
To: [%原邮件收件人名称]
Sent: [%来信日期]
Subject: [%原邮件主题]

[%原邮件附件名列表]
[%原邮件内容]

@a - because the oficial website, http://www.dreammail.org , is in Chinese.

@nedmech - http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dreammail.org%2F&sl=zh-CN&tl=en

I've been using DreamMail for several years now and have been mostly satisfied. The last time I updated it, it actually used an auto-update feature to update itself in-place. It's now up to v4.6.0.1 :)

It doesn't seem to support hotmail accounts anymore since Microsoft changed the access to them, and even though the website (www.dreammail.org - you'll have to translate it) says it supports Live, I haven't been able to get that to work yet.

Unfortunately, I haven't really been able to tell what the latest updates have improved. There has been no documentation for release notes that I have been able to find. And the English version of the site doesn't seem to be active any more.

So while I am still satisfied with the operation of the program, I am a little disappointed with the lack of documentation (especially in English).

why is the website at softpedia?

Very old news ...
This version is out for more than a year.
The program will not be developed anymore.

I agree with Scott B in that I'd really like to see a means of blocking external images. My only other complaint is when replying to an email I often want to reply to each paragraph a person may have written to me however I can't find a way in DM to change the indented text so that it can be seen at a glance who wrote what. Either it is all indented or not. Other than that I really like DM although have only been using it a few days.

I've used DM over 2 years,truely it's one of the best portable email clients so far, but the new version 4.5 is moving forward too slowly, I've heard that the new version will be far more improved(more likely rumor), such as to fix the CN coding/encoding problem.But I'm afraid its tardy development and disappointing bugs makes me incredulous that the number of DM users is still increasing?!

I've been waiting fu**ing so long for the next version!

I really like DreamMail. It loads VERY quickly from my UBS stick. But it has a big drawback in that my email recipents complain about Chinese encoding. I cannot figure out a way around this either. Also in the html template editor there are a few bugs that cause unwanted characters to appear persistently.
On the other hand, the program works very quickly and has just about everything. The RSS feeder is great, and what is more awesome is that it will automatically log you on to your webmail site for you (like Yahoo).
Most dissappointing is that the European website is closed down and the only "link" to the original is a Chinese site with no accomodations for help. Alas!
If anyone happens to come up with some help for the Chinese encoding, please post it here!

I've been using Dreammail for 2 months now, on portable harddisk, with Windows XP machine. So far I love it.

Today I switched to Windows Vista machine. It could not find the database, even after I installed the patch DHTMLEdit. Is this because I'm running it from portable device? Any advice? Thanks.

Scott B assessment of DreamMail does it for me, I won't be using it untill a much improved version is released. Pity, I was hopeful...

I do have to stand up for Outlook Express, which is the mail client I still use. It is true its use of the IE HTML render engine can be a security liability, but it CAN be secured and made into a convenient, if unsophisticated, mail client. For a more elaborate argument, please see my post at the K-Meleon General forum:

http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/forum/read.php?1,23886,24141#msg-24141

I discovered DreamMail about a year ago and tested it for a few months. The program, upon first glance, seems very impressive. However, the more I used it the more frustrated I became. Here are the issues I have with DreamMail:

1. There is no way to disable the loading of remote images in HTML view. Remote images are one of the ways spammers can verify if an email address is valid or not.
2. The ability to turn preview pane on/off should be able to be set on a "by folder" basis. (And, by default the preview pane should be disabled for the Junk Mail folder.)
3. When I right-click a folder in the folder list it opens that folder in the message list rather than just displaying the context menu. For example, I want to right-click the Trash folder to empty it. I don't necessarily need to to see the messages in the folder's message list. I just need to empty the Trash, not see it. Every other email client I have used only displays the context menu on a right-click.
4. If I select a message in the message list to view it in the preview pane and then scroll through the message to read all of the contents, afterward I can't simply just hit the delete button on my keyboard to delete the message. The focus has to be placed back in the message list before the delete key works. The message is still selected, but as long as the focus is on the preview pane the message does not get deleted with the delete key.
5. Ability to "sanitize" HTML messages, as in Thunderbird and several other email clients is missing.
6. The menu system is very "non-standard". Items are not where they are expected to be. It is common convention (in almost every Windows program) to place "Print" in the file menu. However, DreamMail places it in the Mail menu. But, on the contrary, one would think "Compose" would be in the Mail menu, but it is under Tools. Why? It doesn't make sense. The menus need to be completely redone.
7. The spam filter seems to have no rhyme or reason to what it considers spam. There is no explanation that I can find as to whether this is a Bayesian filter or what criteria it uses. It has had a horrible detection rate for me with many missed spam messages making it into my inbox and A LOT of false positives.
8. The program, by default, does not adhere to the standard of placing the mail database, user account data, etc. in the %APPDATA% directory, which is typically c:\Documents and Settings\User\Application Data. Trying to move the data there using MultiUser Management did not work.
9. Tabbing in the compose window take the user from the "To:" field, to the "CC:" field, to the "Subject" field, etc. and then loops back through those fields. Tabbing does not take you into the message text area as it should.
10. Pasting from another progam seems to cause strange things to happen with line breaks. Some lines break in the middle of the window, others scroll out of view. I also noticed that pasting with special characters seems to force a line break at that special character. (- % etc.)
11. From what I can tell, DreamMail uses IE to render HTML mail. This is the reason I moved away from Outlook Express many years ago.
12. No spell checker.

I really wanted to like DreamMail. I love its style. I think that it has a lot of promise, but some of these issues were "deal breakers" for me.

I have not used it in several months and have never used the portable version. Some of these issue may be fixed now. However, I never got any response back from my emails or posts to their forums about these issues.

Only works with chinese charset :(

sisr@igcar.gov.in Connecting the server error, please check your network settings. If you have set the Firewall please check if it allows the program to visit the Internet.
sisr@igcar.gov.in Connecting the server error, please check your network settings. If you have set the Firewall please check if it allows the program to visit the Internet.

Love this program for web mail and pop mail. It is my default application. Usr it on desktop. usb and laptop. Love it

great program but I'm worried by the fact that support messages can be send with system info, but you never ever get an answer!
I'm a reviewer and I've send several requests for information: but no life sign.....

Looks very nice and works perfectly with the e-mail account from my ISP.. However, downloading my Hotmail account is problematic. A few times it worked but usually you get a error message saying 'unauthorised'. There is a similar complaint on the EU Forum from Dreammail and a solution given, one that unfortunately doesn't work. Too bad because I can't use Dreammail because of this error.

One bug I noticed after nearly a week of daily use:

The program is origianlly Chinese and there are still a few growing pains converting from Chinese to other languages. The interface languages are perfect, but in the body of the text, special characters are often not correctly coded, especially during replies, forwards, etc. So if you often have foreign language emails (French for example), there is a high probability that instead of some accented characters, you will either be sending a Chinese character or something a bit garbled, but still understandable.

In English emails, the only character affected is the single quote...so far.

This is an old problem, but is _supposed_ to be fixed with the upcoming version 5.0.

I am therefore a bit less enthusiastic than before.

Wonderful email client. Beautiful, functional, extremely customizable, stable, simple for newbie's and lots of advanced features for the rest. It is natively portable (no registry, no files outside of application folder) and has become my default email client on my USB key.

Hint: Once extracted from the .rar file, delete all the pictures in the "Face" (smilies) and "Templet" (background templates) directories, delete the language files that you do not need in the "Language" directory and compress everything you can (.exe, .dll, .ocx) with UPX and Jazz-UPX and you have a complete and portable email and RSS client in 5.5 Mb.

9.5 out of 10. It would get 10 out of 10 if it had built in calendar/organizer like Essential PIM (but I'm dreaming here). Can easily replace Eudora, Outlook Express, Thunderbird and the like.

It's a fine and beautiful program. But for some it might be important to know that it also depends on IE. (Rightclick in the message pane and see your IE context menu).