Mailsmith 2.0
As commented upon by John Gruber of Daring Fireball (among others), Mailsmith 2.0 has been released. As an enthusiastic user of Bare Bones’s other main product, BBEdit*, I thought I would try it out. It is indeed chock full of nice touches. The filtering, text manipulation and searching is very powerful, and the glossary and stationery facilities look like they would be pretty handy. I don’t mind the somewhat minimalist look at allâI think it’s quite classy.
But. You could see that word coming, couldn’t you? I personally can’t use Mailsmith as a full time mail client yet as about 90% of my mail comes through my work IMAP account, and Mailsmith only supports POP. Another worry is the mailbox format. One of the (many) reasons I switched from Entourage to Apple Mail as soon as it had enough functionality was that I worried about keeping so much precious information in a proprietary format. Not only are you up certain riverine formations without a means of propulsion if the database gets corrupted (which seemed to happen alarmingly frequently with Entourage), but you can find yourself locked in to using that client forever, or losing your email archives.
There are plenty of annoying problems with Apple Mail, but it does at least use the ‘mbox’ format. I know that if I ever want to take my custom elsewhere, most other email clients (including Mailsmith) will allow me to import the file fairly easily. If not, it’s just plain text, and I could (assuming that my knowledge of Perl improves a bit), write a fairly simple script to extract and convert the information into an appropriate format. In the very worst case scenario, I could just read or search the file. I’m sure that Bare Bones have their reasons for using a proprietary format (perhaps mbox is less efficient to deal with), but it does make me think twice about possibly switching to Mailsmith in the future if they implement IMAP, in a way that the price doesn’t.
*Though I much prefer the neat and fast-evolving skEdit for HTML editing.
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mbox is a real pig to parse quickly. Apple Mail croaks at about 1000 messages in a folder, whereas Eudora (my mail app of choice) has a few folders with nearly 10,000 mails in that it can open at the click of my fingers.
The difference between them (for they both use mbox) is, from what I've seen, that Eudora maintains a summary index of the contents of the mbox, whereas Mail parses the entire mbox each time. Netscape 2 and 3 used to have a similar strategy to Eudora, as noted by jwz's mail summary document.
Anyway, yes, pure mbox is woefully inefficient, so a proprietary format does have some reasons to exist, but there are other solutions.----- Eudora can handle over 32,000 messages per mailbox. I think the actual count is 36,600 but I try to keep my boxes no larger than 32,000 messages. Eudora's version of mbox, with their addition of summary indices makes even their largest mailbox fairly responsive. I do like how MailSmith handles searches and filters, when filters are just views of information. But I can't complain about Eudora's search or filter functions either. Every since version 4.3 of Eudora, I started using it as both an active email client and a flexible information database. There new search function is fast, and highly capable. I use it both to find data quickly and to reduce mailbox size for some of the more prolific groups I belong to...since you can move, code, and perform other tasks on found items, even if they are across multiple mailboxes. Plus Eudora handles IMAP & POP.
by allgood2 @ 21/06/2003 2:07 am • Permalink •
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That's interesting to know. I used to use Eudora (many, many moons ago in System 8), but it looks like I might have to give it another look. It sounds like it might be the best of both worlds with mbox, and fast searching/indexing.
by bsag @ 21/06/2003 5:07 pm • Permalink •
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For what itâs worth, Mailsmith lets you export mailboxes in the mbox format. You can do it either via the Export menu option, or (since 2.0, AFAIK), you can just drag a mailbox into the Finder, a la Entourage.
by Matt Gemmell @ 22/06/2003 5:06 pm • Permalink •
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I really like PowerMail. It's search is very fast, it handles POP and IMAP accounts and can import/export to a wide range of formats, and is of course very scriptable so it's very easy to transfer mail into vertially anything you want (I have my own mail backups sored in an ultra fast Valentina database). Best of all, it's just like having good old Claris Emailer for OSX !!
by Ian Mantripp @ 22/06/2003 8:06 pm • Permalink •
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