When you think of email clients, the obvious names that come to mind are Mozilla Thunderbird, The Bat, Microsoft Outlook and Apple Mail. But the smallest and the fastest of all the email clients that are available today is Alpine. It is an email client developed by the University of Washington in the United States. Alpine email client is available for Windows, Linux and Mac.
While other email clients are more than a 100 MB in size, the latest version of Alpine for Windows is only 3.7 MB. However, Alpine has relatively older user interface which reminds you of the times when command line interfaces dominated. Alpine is controlled only through your keyboard and does not require any mouse.
After launching Alpine, the first thing you will have to do is add your email accounts in Alpine. This is not as easy as it is in other email clients. For example, if you want to access your Gmail account then you must have Google Suite and then you can register Alpine as an internal app in the Google developers console. This will give you some values which must be entered in Alpine. Afterwards, you have to authorize Alpine to access your Gmail account. Compared to these confusing steps, Mozilla Thunderbird auto-detects all the settings for your email address and you just have to enter the password.
Fortunately, Alpines comes with contextual help all through its user interface. You can press the key Ctrl+G to view and access the help associated with any option on the Alpine screen. In addition, its website also gives step-by-step instructions to configure the Alpine email client with all the popular email providers like Gmail, Yahoo, Yandex, Outlook, and more.
Yandex is very fast email client application and it keeps the system resources consumption to the minimal. It has some limitations when reading the email messages, for example, it cannot read rich email messages. But if you like working with your keyboard only then you should definitely give Alpine a try.
You can download Alpine from http://alpine.x10host.com/.