tools we've already seensuch as threads and tkinter guis like the pymail console-based program we wrote in pymailgui runs entirely on your local computer your email is fetched from and sent to remote mail servers over socketsbut the program and its user interface run locally as resultpymailgui is called an email clientlike pymailit employs python' client-side tools to talk to mail servers from the local machine unlike pymailthoughpymailgui is full-featured user interfaceemail operations are performed with point-and-click operations and advanced mail processing such as attachmentssave filesand internationalization is supported like many examples presented in this textpymailgui is practicaluseful program in facti run it on all kinds of machines to check my email while traveling around the world teaching python classes although pymailgui won' put microsoft outlook out of business anytime soonit has two key pragmatic features alluded to earlier that have nothing to do with email itself--portability and scriptabilitywhich are attractive features in their own right and merit few additional words hereit' portable pymailgui runs on any machine with sockets and python with tkinter installed because email is transferred with the python librariesany internet connection that supports post office protocol (popand simple mail transfer protocol (smtpaccess will do moreoverbecause the user interface is coded with tkinterpymailgui should workunchangedon windowsthe window system (unixlinux)and the macintosh (classic and os )as long as python runs there too microsoft outlook may be more feature-rich packagebut it has to be run on windowsand more specificallyon single windows machine because it generally deletes email from server as it is downloaded by default and stores it on the clientyou cannot run outlook on multiple machines without spreading your email across all those machines by contrastpymailgui saves and deletes email only on requestand so it is bit friendlier to people who check their email in an ad hoc fashion on arbitrary computers (like meit' scriptable pymailgui can become anything you want it to be because it is fully programmable in factthis is the real killer feature of pymailgui and of open source software like python in general--because you have full access to pymailgui' source codeyou are in complete control of where it evolves from here you have nowhere near as much control over commercialclosed products like outlookyou generally get whatever large company decided you needalong with whatever bugs that company might have introduced as python scriptpymailgui is much more flexible tool for instancewe can change its layoutdisable featuresand add completely new functionality quickly by changing its python source code don' like the mail-list displaychange few "use the sourceluke