IncrediMail is an e-mail program that works by adding thousands of e-mail backgrounds, Emoticons, Ecards, Sounds, Animations, and 3D effects to your e-mails. You also get fun animated characters to notify you of incoming e-mail. IncrediMail is compatible with leading email services including Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, and AOL, and supports POP mail protocols as well as HTML mail formatting. Importing your active e-mail accounts and messages with IncrediMail is quick and simple. The program includes advanced message filtering, automatic spellchecker, and font style preferences.

With its straightforward interface and whimsical attitude, IncrediMail appeals to the casual e-mailer, but actually offers enough features--like Exchange server support--to be functional for more serious endeavors. You can personalize your messages with background stationery from a variety of categories, including animals, art, technology, and moods. The program installs with about 50 backgrounds, most with a cartoony feel, and you can download more online or create your own with Letter Creator (a 10-use trial comes with this download). It supports recorded voice attachments, and the premium version supports skins.

There are a few drawbacks. The overall interface lacks pizazz and looks like it was last overhauled back when emoticons were new. There's a questionnaire that must be filled out when installing the program, annoying even at three questions long. More significantly, IncrediMail turns into quite the resource pig when playing around with graphics-heavy backgrounds.

The features are solid, though. The program offers basic e-mail client functions, including sending, receiving, and organizing messages; managing your address book; and creating rules for how to handle certain messages. Among its other included features are an integrated JunkFilter that lets you assign permission for senders or domains, IMAP support via a POP3 emulator, and Message Rules functions that work in concert with JunkFilter. IncrediMail makes standard e-mail a bit more fun for home users, especially for kids and kids at heart.