What used to be the most expensive e-mail client available, is now the cheapest (free, even). And, for someone like me who's always wanted to become a Mailsmith user but found myself in the wrong tax bracket, this is very good news.

I can put what's attractive about Mailsmith very succinctly, as it gives you most the text editing powers of BBEdit (which are many) in an e-mail client. If that sentence means nothing to you, then you probably won't care about Mailsmith. Like BBEdit, it's spartan and utilitarian. But like me and the thousands of other BBEdit users, we only care about what's under the hood.

Now with that said, there's a few things that bug me about the program. The inability to reorganize the mailbox list or toolbar is a little bothersome, and I wouldn't call it's functionality exactly intuitive. But then again, having multiple clipboards and hot-keyed clippings more than make up for it, so I'll chose not to sweat the small stuff.

Also in interest of full disclosure, I feel I should mention it's spam filtering capabilities are limited. This is a feature not terribly important to me, but others seem to live and die by it. They do include a demo of SpamSieve as a consolation (which I find more annoying than spam itself. Luckily, being an old Powermail user, I've learned to turn that thing off in a quick hurry). But I've found the in-program filtering to be sufficient.

Anyway, if you've read this far, you should at least give it a try. Like BBEdit, there's a bit of a learning curve. But there's numerous rewards for riding that curve out. If you're serious about your e-mail composition, this program is as serious as you.

This kind of user-interface (whereever that is!) makes me angry.
Sluggish, impossible to find the functionality you're looking for (eg. setting up accounts), etc. Everything is malplaced and slow.
Won't recommend.

Mailsmith has gotten better, not the least because it's now free. But it still has some quirks that bother me. To begin with, it will display an HTML message only as an attachment, which means extra clicks and windows to deal with. Also, mail message window size is inconsistent and after considerable experimentation in the preferences I could find no way to standardize it.

Among the application's strengths is support for SpamSeive, a robust spam filter. Other than window width, the interface is quite flexible, though there appears to be no way to customize the menu bar.

It is another program, like Text Wrangler, that BareBones has set free, for which I commend them. It remains to be seen if the "new" company in charge of it will continue development.

After reading all of your comments ProgramHappy I think you should consider changing your nic to ProgramUnhappy.

...did I miss something, or am I unable to change the font style for individual words. Whenever I tried to bold a word, the entire message was bolded.

Also, I wasn't able to paste images inline.

Both of those issues are dealbreakers for me, even though the software is free.