Mailsmith 2.0, The First

Submitted by Morbus Iff on Wed, 2003-06-18 21:24

Partly because I'm disgusted with "OSX SUX" comments of the immature Eudora developer, and partly because I love trying new things, I've been experimented with the newly released Mailsmith 2.0 email program, from the same people who bring you BBEdit (my favoritest piece of software in the whole blasted WOorllldD!). I can't say I'm ready (or remotely near willing) to make it my default client. My running notes:

  • The "Import" dialogue says it works for Eudora 4.0 to 5.1, but it had no problem importing with the beta 6.0. The import itself took nearly half an hour, averaging about three minutes for a mailbox with 2700 messages. Near the end of the import, whilst it was sucking in address book entries, it crashed (yes, I reported it and they've already responded, suspecting it's related to my Eudora Filters).
  • Mailsmith uses a single data store under ~/Mail/Mailsmith User Data/ which is the primary reason I never used the (superior to Eudora, IMO) Microsoft Entourage. I'm not fond of single points of failures (ok, actually, its a bunch of mailboxes encapsulated under that one large file [see your shell], but the files themselves are in a binary format, making them more difficult to work with [or recover from if they're corrupted]).
  • Mailsmith has a handy per-email "Notes" feature, which is nice when you want to save meta data. Eudora has a similar feature (open up a message window, and you'll have a bar at the top which you can add your own notes too, which will superseding the subject line in mailbox display).
  • The default behavior is to compress all email attachments (dubbed "enclosures") with Stuffit, which seems like the most misguided AOL-like behavior I've ever seen. I don't email just Mac users, and automatically compressing them with a Mac-specific compression format is silly. (Yes, Stuffit exists for Windows, but it's not a format supported by WinZip, the defacto and expected standard.) UPDATE: Yes, this can be turned off, but I'm arguing for its exclusion as a default setting.
  • For some odd reason, there's an infinite horizontal scrollbar on each message window. That's costing me 10 pixels, roughly two lines of text, in screen real estate. Why is it there?!
  • I hate preview windows with a passion. Thankfully, you can shut that off and open each message in its own window, but this seems awfully, awfully slow - you can count blips as you wait for an email to open, switch to the next one in the list, or to close the window. Those blips will eat up a lot of time.
  • Keycommands are customizable, which is nice, since I could bring over my most used Eudora features quickly and easily: "Move to next message", "Move to previous message", and "Delete current message, and move to next".
  • Brand new, just received, emails show a BCC in the header. Why? BCC's are blind, meaning I'll never ever see 'em. Why waste 7 more pixels with a useless header that should theoretically never contain data?
  • Multiple email addresses, in the To: or CC:, are hidden (like "Morbus Iff, and two others"). This drives me absolutely batty (why hide such valuable information?) Sure, I can click an expander triangle to see them, but this preference DOESN'T STICK from message to message, meaning each and every time, I'm either going to lose some valuable visual information about the email, or I'm going to waste my time moving the mouse. I hate the mouse. UPDATE: Can be automated with key commands but three unnecessary keypresses for every message is not good enough.
  • Scrolling in large mailbox views (with 2500+ messages) is very very slow. Page down, wait, page down, wait, slow. Not good. Likewise, searching for the word "crap" in the body and headers of 14,000 Eudora messages took 30 seconds. Searching for the same word in 11,000 messages in Mailsmith, with the same criteria, took more than 2 minutes, and it had only found 400 entries of the 1100 Eudora did (I didn't wait for Mailsmith to finish).
  • I use label colors to classify emails much more visually than stuffing them away in different mailboxes. In Eudora, the entire message display line becomes colored, meaning I've got 500 pixels of color to quickly scan. In Mailsmith, only the "Label" column becomes colorized, meaning a) I've got to have that column turned on (less screen real-estate), b) and I've got to focus on a small portion of the display window (roughly 75 pixels) to get the visual indication I expected. Less useful. UPDATE: Strike this. I can duplicate Eudora's behavior by setting "Use Label Color for Entire Row" in the "Mail Lists" preferences.

So far, Mailsmith isn't holding any chance of replacing Eudora, but I've got 29 more days of my free demo, so I'll fiddle some more and see what else I can find.