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.
