Netscape Mail and Newsgroups, commonly known as just Netscape Mail, was an

email Electronic mail (usually shortened to email; alternatively hyphenated e-mail) is a method of transmitting and receiving Digital media, digital messages using electronics, electronic devices over a computer network. It was conceived in the ...

and

news News is information about current events. This may be provided through many different Media (communication), media: word of mouth, printing, Mail, postal systems, broadcasting, Telecommunications, electronic communication, or through the te ...

client Client(s) or The Client may refer to: * Client (business) * Client (computing), hardware or software that accesses a remote service on another computer * Customer or client, a recipient of goods or services in return for monetary or other valuable ...

produced by

Netscape Communications Corporation Netscape Communications Corporation (originally Mosaic Communications Corporation) was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California, and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape (web browser), Nets ...

as part of the

Netscape Netscape Communications Corporation (originally Mosaic Communications Corporation) was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California, and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was o ...

series of suites between versions 2.0 to 7.2. In the 2.x and 3.x series, it was bundled with the web browser. In the 4.x series, it was rewritten as two separate programs known as Netscape Messenger and Netscape Collabra.

Features

Netscape Mail & Newsgroups features support for relevant protocols such as

IMAP In computing, the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) is an Internet standard protocol used by email clients to retrieve email messages from a mail server over a TCP/IP connection. IMAP is defined by . IMAP was designed with the goal of per ...

POP3 In computing, the Post Office Protocol (POP) is an application-layer Internet standard protocol used by e-mail clients to retrieve e-mail from a mail server. Today, POP version 3 (POP3) is the most commonly used version. Together with IMAP, i ...

and

SMTP The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is an Internet standard communication protocol for electronic mail transmission. Mail servers and other message transfer agents use SMTP to send and receive mail messages. User-level email clients typi ...

, a built-in

Bayesian spam filter In statistics, naive (sometimes simple or idiot's) Bayes classifiers are a family of " probabilistic classifiers" which assumes that the features are conditionally independent, given the target class. In other words, a naive Bayes model assumes th ...

, support for multiple accounts, etc. Released in 1995, it was the first mail reader (or

Usenet Usenet (), a portmanteau of User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose UUCP, Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Elli ...

reader) to support native display of HTML messages. Initially its development was overseen in-house, but following

AOL AOL (formerly a company known as AOL Inc. and originally known as America Online) is an American web portal and online service provider based in New York City, and a brand marketed by Yahoo! Inc. The service traces its history to an online ...

's purchase of Netscape in 1998, its codebase development was handed over to the

Mozilla Foundation The Mozilla Foundation is an American non-profit organization that exists to support and collectively lead the Open-source software, open source Mozilla project. Founded in July 2003, the organization sets the policies that govern development, ...

, originally initiated by Netscape, and therefore became based upon the Mozilla Mail & Newsgroups component of the

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

Mozilla Application Suite The Mozilla Application Suite (originally known as Mozilla, marketed as the Mozilla Suite) is a discontinued cross-platform integrated Internet suite. Its development was initiated by Netscape Communications Corporation, before their acquisition ...

. Mozilla ceased development of the suite between 2004 and 2006 in favour of stand-alone applications, and as a consequence Netscape's series of suites were also discontinued. In 2005, Netscape released Netscape Browser 8, based upon

Mozilla Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements curren ...

, which did not include an email client, therefore the latest version inclusive of a mail client, version 7.2, became unsupported. The development of Mozilla Mail and Newsgroups has now been continued as SeaMonkey Mail and Newsgroups.

Re-generation

In 2007, after the release of stand-alone browser

Netscape Navigator 9 Netscape Navigator 9 is a discontinued web browser that was produced by the Netscape Communications division of parent AOL, first announced on January 23, 2007. It was the ninth major release of the Netscape line of browsers. After AOL outsourced ...

, Netscape confirmed that it would once again develop an e-mail client, now named Netscape Messenger 9. The new release was to be based upon Mozilla Mail's successor,

Mozilla Thunderbird Mozilla Thunderbird is a free and open-source email client that also functions as a personal information manager with a Digital calendar, calendar and contactbook, as well as an RSS feed reader, chat client (IRC/XMPP/Matrix (protocol), Matrix), ...

. Additionally, after an official

poll Poll, polled, or polling may refer to: Forms of voting and counting * Poll, a formal election ** Election verification exit poll, a survey taken to verify election counts ** Polling, voting to make decisions or determine opinions ** Polling pla ...

posted on Netscape's community support board in late 2006, speculation arose of the Netscape 7 series of suites (including the Mail client) being fully supported and updated by Netscape's in-house development team once more, including major bug fixes and security issues. However, development of Netscape Messenger (and any speculation of an update of Netscape 7) was ended when AOL announced they would end development and support of Netscape Navigator and Netscape Messenger. Support ended on March 1, 2008.

References

External links

Netscape Browser Archive

Netscape Navigator homepage

Netscape Messenger 9.0a1
{{DEFAULTSORT:Netscape Mail and Newsgroups Netscape Windows email clients Email client software for Linux Classic Mac OS email clients MacOS email clients

Features

Re-generation

See also

References

External links