Why not Mailsmith?

On Oct 26, 2006, at 13:17, Charlie Garrison wrote:

And the only other feature I've seen mentioned in this thread that Mailsmith doesn't have is option-click sorting.

A lot of features have been mentioned that aren't in Mailsmith.

I *really* wanted to like Mailsmith. I'm a BBEdit fanatic, and to have its editing engine in a mail client would be great. Plus, Mailsmith is by far the most scriptable client, and as you said, it easily has the most powerful filtering mechanism. However, three Eudora features that Mailsmith lacks keep me away:

1) It uses a proprietary database instead of text files to store mail. This one has been well-covered here, so I'll leave it at that.

2) On my older G4 hardware, it's UI is sluggish compared to Eudora, and worse, the program essentially grinds to a halt when you have more than a couple thousand messages in a mailbox. Thus, it's not at all suitable for high-volume usage. (Bare Bones support suggested archiving the messages out as a solution.)

3) It doesn't work well with HTML. As much as I despise it, I have many clients and customers who use HTML mail. Since I usually need the visual presentation to properly understand the messages (e.g., color-coded document revisions), Mailsmith's method of showing a text version won't work very well. Also, I need to be able to reply in kind.

There are other missing features, as well, such as quick menu-based access to mailboxes and extensive configurability.

Regards, Bob

On 10/26/06 2:17 PM, "Charlie Garrison" <garrisonzeta.org.au> wrote:

I'm really surprised at the lack of people including Mailsmith in the feature comparisons.

Mailsmith is a great POP3 email client, but the lack of IMAP support (now or ever, judging by the FAQ) and the general lack of development attention (it's been a year since the last release) makes me more than a little leery of its future.

--Nik

On 26 Oct 2006, at 14:17 , Charlie Garrison wrote:

On 23/10/06 at 2:34 AM -0700, Andrew Laurence <atlaurenes.nacs.uci.edu> wrote:

> For me, it's really the first one. Eudora remains the *only* client > of which I am aware which can run a filter on messages:

I'm really surprised at the lack of people including Mailsmith in the feature comparisons. Mailsmith has the best filtering of any mail client I have ever seen, period.

That's true. Mailsmith's filtering is just about good enough to obviate any need for procmail.

However, mailsmith (and I love the guys at Barebones and BBEdit is an Essential Tool for me) has many other issues.

Chiefly is the monolithic database and the speed. Or should I say the lack of speed. I've tried out mailsmith a few times, and I've always ended up back on mail. Partly that is because all my heavy- lifting of filtering is already done on the server by procmail, so its advantages in that area are not actually useful to me.

And, while I know they hate html email even more than I do, it's just silly for any email client to refuse to handle HTML email at all. I mean, Webkit is free. Display the HTML email when i want it displayed. And making my switch apps to see the email is not the same. What's wrong with BBEDit's preview window? Use that code.

-- Try to realize it's all within yourself/No one else can make you change

On 10/27/06 at 6:09 PM, gerberinik.net (Nik) wrote:

>Mailsmith is a great POP3 email client, but the lack of IMAP support
>(now or ever, judging by the FAQ) and the general lack of
>development attention (it's been a year since the last release)
>makes me more than a little leery of its future.

If you need IMAP, then clearly Mailsmith is not for you nor is
it likely to be. But, the time from the last release is not an
indicator of a lack of support from Barebones or an indication
Mailsmith has no future.

On 10/27/06 at 6:14 PM, gkremegmail.com (Lewis Butler) wrote:

>Chiefly is the monolithic database and the speed. Or should I say
>the lack of speed.

You might want to look again. Speed has improved with every
release. You may find the speed of the current version adequate
for your needs.

>And, while I know they hate html email even more than I do, it's
>just silly for any email client to refuse to handle HTML email at
>all. I mean, Webkit is free. Display the HTML email when i want it
>displayed.

It is somewhat misleading to say Mailsmith does not handle html
email. True, Mailsmith does not display html. But the html is
present as an attachment and simply double clicking on the
attachment causes the html to be displayed in the default
browser. For the rare times when I get html email that I want to
see displayed as originally intended, this works fine for me.
And I emphasize rare since well over 95% of the html email I get
is spam, not something I want or have an interest in.

I was a Mailsmith supporter at one point, and had high hopes for it:

<http://db.tidbits.com/article/7289>

Yes, it had superb text handling and filtering. However, after a year of
use, none of the problems I was in contact with Bare Bones about had been
fixed. Indeed, my reports and requests were usually met by a certain
derision from the developers, who seemed to me to have a "blame the victim"
attitude towards both users of other mail clients and their own users. At
the time I switched again (to Entourage), the problems included the
following:

* Certain actions were incredibly slow; deleting large quantities of spam or
trashed messages could take five to ten minutes, with no threading so
Mailsmith was completely frozen up.

* Mailbox message counts were often incorrect, so I couldn't tell when I'd
received new mail.

* Requests to stuff an enclosure were often not obeyed, and I couldn't
add-and-stuff a folder by way of the Add dialog.

* No sorting on multiple columns, and (therefore) no threading of messages.

* No Undo, especially of common actions like moving or trashing a message.

* No support for encodings or Unicode characters (a message in Hebrew would
be illegible, for example).

* When reading a message in its own window, there was no way to easily find
that message in the message list of its containing folder.

* There was no "history" feature - so there was no easy way to address an
email to a person you just sent an email to five minutes ago.

* No rendering of HTML messages within Mailsmith, and if the message
involved attached images, it didn't work in Safari either.

* Scrolling behavior when you deleted messages from a message list was
wrong, such that it was then hard to find where you just were.

* Many important actions were not scriptable.

* Exporting certain mailboxes could yield invalid mbox files, making it
impossible to export an mbox and then import to another program without
signficant hand-work.

* There was no way to export a message as a pure text file.

Whatever was good about Mailsmith, I didn't feel it was worth suffering
through those problems all the time. m.

--
matt neuburg, phd = matttidbits.com, http://www.tidbits.com/matt/
pantes anthropoi tou eidenai oregontai phusei
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Matt Neuburg said:

>I was a Mailsmith supporter at one point


I just want to point out that, by my estimation, there are at least 26
e-mail clients for OS X. Folks aren't limited to choosing between
Mail.app, Eudora, Mailsmith, and Entourage. Several of these other
e-mail clients are free.

If anyone would like a list of the Mac e-mail clients that I know of for
OS X, feel free to drop me a private e-mail.

One of my favorites is:

GyazMail ($18)
http://www.gyazsquare.com/gyazmail/
This e-mail program specializes in speed, stability & data protection. A
lot of people prefer its user interface, which is very similiar to
Outlook Express' and Claris Emailer's. It's biggest claim to fame is that
it stores all of its e-mail messages (according to RFC spec) in
individual files on your hard drive - so you don't have to worry about
corruption of a huge monolithic e-mail database. Unfortuantely GyazMail
does not yet have IMAP support.


Randy B. Singer

Co-Author of:
The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th and 6th editions)

OS X Routine Maintenance
http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html

On 30 Oct 2006, at 20:46 , Bill Rowe wrote:
> On 10/27/06 at 6:14 PM, gkremegmail.com (Lewis Butler) wrote:
>> Chiefly is the monolithic database and the speed. Or should I say
>> the lack of speed.
>
> You might want to look again. Speed has improved with every
> release. You may find the speed of the current version adequate
> for your needs.

I forgot to mention it's other show-stopper failure, and that is its
lack of support for IMAP. the only POP account I have is gmail, and
that is, hopefully, temporary.

> It is somewhat misleading to say Mailsmith does not handle html
> email. True, Mailsmith does not display html. But the html is
> present as an attachment and simply double clicking on the
> attachment causes the html to be displayed in the default
> browser.

On my machine that means not only opening a different app, but
switching from my email desktop to my web desktop. And it's silly.
Mailsmith/BBEdit already have the hooks in place to call WebKit and
display a message, switching apps is just silly.


--
"There's a light that shines on everything & everyone. And it shines
so bright - brighter even than the sun". That's what Minnie thinks as
she walks to meet her brother, who is nearly two years older, on a
Saturday night. He's DJ-ing at some do on the edge of town on the
night that Minnie Timperley died.