What is Incredimail?
Incredimail® is an email program that offers lots of animated characters, also called notifiers, to announce when you have mail. It also offers a wide array of other multimedia options including sounds, animations, ecards, pretty background templates for your email and more. Users of Incredimail generally have a love/hate relationship with it. Many users would not do without it, while some people who have tried it want desperately to remove it completely from their computer.

You'll find listed below instructions on how to remove Incredimail manually, or if you would like an automatic removal program for Incredimail®, click here skip to the bottom of the page.

How Do I Know If I Have Incredimail Installed?

You'll notice an icon similar to the following in the system tray next to the clock if Incredimail is installed on your computer.

Incredimail tray icon

You'll also see a couple new icons on your desktop that look like this.

Incredimail Desktop Icons

If you run Hijackthis, you'll also notice the following lines that have been added:
R0 - HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main,Start Page = http://mystart.incredimail.com/english/
O4 - HKCU\..\Run: [IncrediMail] C:\Program Files\IncrediMail\bin\IncMail.exe /c

Transferring Incredimail Messages to Outlook Express

Incredimail® does not make it easy to move your messages back to Outlook Express. However, there is a good article on About.com that explains what you need to transfer the messages back to OE and how to do it.

How Do I Remove Incredimail®?

1) Click on Start, Settings, Control Panel

2) Double click on Add/Remove Programs

3) Find "Incredimail" in the list of installed programs and click on Change/Remove to uninstall it.
Incredimail in Add Remove Programs

Follow along with the prompts to complete the uninstall.

Problems with Uninstalling Incredimail

Unfortunately, when the normal procedure for uninstalling Incredimail® does not work, it can leave parts of Incredimail® still intact. With over 125 folders, almost 800 files, and close to 2200 registry keys created by Incredimail®, removing it manually can be quite a chore.

In many cases, a regular uninstall will leave the undeleteable file called imshext.dll on the hard drive or remove the option from Add/Remove Programs but leave most if not all of Incredimail intact. The problems removing Incredimail have been so numerous that even Microsoft has a support page on how to remove Incredimail® files manually through the Windows registry. The Microsoft document is focused on fixing the error message "Cannot Find Incredimail.exe" when you open an attachment after removing Incredimail from your computer. From my experience though, this list is incomplete and still leaves bits and pieces floating around.

Here is the list from Microsoft of the items in the registry that should be removed.

Under the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT key, delete the following keys:
\.ima
\.imf
\.imi
\.imn
\.ims
\.imw
\Applications\Impcontent.exe
\Applications\Incredimail
\Incredicontent
\Incredimessage

b. Under the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE key, delete the following keys:
Software\Classes\.imc
Software\Clients\Mail\Incredimail
Software\Elishim\Protect\Browser (remove the Incredimail value)
Software\Incredimail
Software\Microsoft\Direct3D\Most Recent Applications\ (remove the NAME value that points to Incredimail.exe)
\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths\Incredimail

c. Delete the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\MenuOrder\Start Menu\Programs\Incredimail key.

Because of the many emails I have received concerning how to remove Incredimail®, I decided to create an automatic uninstaller for it. Of course, you could manually remove many of the items in the list above from your registry, but downloading an automatic uninstaller for Incredimail® might be easier.

Remove Incredimail Automatically

I created the following uninstaller for Incredimail® in hopes that it would help people in the many cases where the normal uninstall routine fails. The program will perform the following functions:

* will check for installation folder (default \Program Files\IncrediMail)
* will try to stop the Incredimail® application, if it is running
* will unregister the Incredimail® dll's
* will remove any leftover Incredimail® files and folders
* will remove any Incredimail® registry entries
* will unregister file associations for Incredimail®
* will remove Incredimail® from the Add/Remove Programs screen

In many cases, My Start by Incredimail® will be the Start Page in Internet Explorer, the removal program will change the Start page back to the default one of MSN.com as well as change the Search Companion back to Windows Live Search.