We use Windows Live Mail on our computers.  When we go on vacation, Windows Live Mail seems to take a great deal of time to load.  We were in Australia at a wi-fi spot and it took over 10 minutes to download our email....

We'll be on a cruise ship with limited (and slow) connections anyway, is there another smaller email program I should consider for emails while on the go where we pay for Internet by the minute?  I want to be able to get off-line to answer emails at leisure, and use the connection times prudently.  Or, is there some way to reduce the complexity of the program so all it needs to do is connect to my server to download email?