Setting up a new email or FTP client can take a while, especially if you’ve lots of accounts. Not only will you have to look up server names, ports, security and other details, but you’ll also have to try and remember all your various passwords.

If you didn’t make a note of yours originally (and you don’t use exactly the same password for everything), there are a few tools which might be able to help. NirSoft’s Mail PassView is one of the best known.

The program works with a wide range of email clients and accounts, including Outlook 2000-2013, Gmail/ Hotmail/ MSN mail/ Yahoo! Mail (if the password is saved locally), Thunderbird (if the password isn’t encrypted by a master password), Windows Mail/ Live Mail/ Outlook Express, IncrediMail, Eudora and more.

To use the program, just download and run it. Any details detected are displayed in a table, including Account Name, Application, Email address, Email server, Server Type (POP3/IMAP/SMTP), User Name, and Password.

recALL uses a variety of techniques to recover logons and program licence keys

As usual with NirSoft tools, any recovered data can be saved in a text report. And so, once you’ve set up your new client, it’s probably wise to save your various account details for reference later.

Mail PassView is an excellent tool, but it relies on low-level knowledge of how and where particular email clients store their logons. If this changes, or you’re using an unsupported client, or you also need to display FTP details, then you could try recALL.

The program is very basic, essentially just setting itself up to work as a local POP3, SMTP and FTP server, then intercepting and displaying any credentials. But it does work for unencrypted connections, and only takes a moment to use.

In Outlook, for instance, you would click Account Settings > E-mail, double-click an account, make a note of the “Incoming mail server” being replacing it with localhost or 127.0.0.1.

Now launch recALL, select Server Emulation and click Next. Use your email client to collect new messages as usual, and recALL intercepts and displays any detected user name and password.

Repeat the process with other accounts, FTP clients or whatever else you need. Restore the original email/ FTP client server names when you’re done, close recALL and you’re back to normal.

One irritation with recALL is it’s not portable, but if necessary, you can still run it from a USB stick. Just install the program as normal, copy the \keit.co folder wherever you need, then run keit.co\recall\recall.exe as required.

As a sort-of bonus, recALL can also recover licence keys and other details from various applications. This didn’t work well for us, but the program was able to recover our Windows 8.1 key, amongst others. If you’re interested, launch recALL, select Automatic Recovery and click Next to check your own system.