Merry Christmas and a Happy New version!

On the threshold of the winter holidays RITLabs announces the launch of the new version of The Bat! software. The Bat! 4.1 has a series of new useful features and improvements of the functions that are already familiar.

The most important enhancement in The Bat! 4.1 is the HTML templates creation option. In the new version creating HTML messages is much easier – in addition to plain text, The Bat! templates can handle the full range of formatting, pictures, background images, tables and other HTML message attributes.

Many business users need to adhere to their corporate style in every message. The new capability makes this extremely easy. The HTML templates allow you to save the graphic elements of your message as a template. All you have to do is write your text in the appropriate place. The same applies to sending accounting and other spreadsheet data. A template with a document headline, a table and a signature is all you need to generate a smart-looking spreadsheet. The table itself can be imported from an external application. These are just a few of the ways that HTML templates can come in handy.

Unicode encoding was first introduced in version 4.0 of The Bat! but was restricted to the messages. With version 4.1, Unicode functionality is extended so that now your templates can contain symbols or any combination of alphabets. For example, users can create templates in English yet include German or Spanish alphabet characters if needed.

The Bat! file system has also been also improved. In the new version there is no limit to the size of the message folder. The threshold for the volume of messages in a folder is determined by the capacities of the hard disk file system. For FAT disks the maximum size of a folder is 2Gb, while NTFS disk users have no restrictions on message folder volume.

RITLabs has made the backup and restore process faster, more reliable, and more convenient. This is made possible by modifications to the backup file format. The new format considerably increases backup reliability. Furthermore, a new file processing algorithm significantly accelerates the backup and restore process.

The Bat! 4.1 allows users to backup or restore selected folders to/from the backup file. This helps ensure you only keep the most important information and do not waste time saving/restoring minor messages. Finally, backup files can be encrypted and password-protected with a safe RC2 algorithm (users are reminded that they will not be able to restore encrypted data without a password nor can they restore data backed up by The Bat! 4.1 with older versions).

In The Bat! 4.1 the proxy server mechanism was essentially improved. Besides, we added time stamp option for digital signatures. When working with the S/MIME protocol, users can create four kinds of certificate: signature only, encryption only, signature and encryption and Certifying Authority (CA) certificates. The Bat! 4.1 uses Windows address book to store TLS certificates.

Users with The Bat! v.4.0 licence, as well as The Bat! v.3 users that purchased the program after November, 20, 2007, can use their existing licence keys with no additional payments or updates. Registered users of The Bat! are eligible for a 30% discount for The Bat! 4.1. Previously purchased keys are not cancelled and can be used at the same time in accordance with the terms of the licence agreement.

We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!