Mailsmith

Have been using 2.4 for a while now, both in pre-release (which I never had a bug to report), and this release build. And it remains awesome. For those who need it spelled out, it's BBEdit, minus the coding features, for free. So if you used BBEdit for word processing (like myself), it's a pretty wonderful thing. As a cherry on top, it's also probably the best POP app for OSX. It has a ridiculously robust feature set for both text editing, and e-mailing. As stated in my review below, if all of that means nothing to you, then Apple's Mail app is probably just fine for your purposes. For the rest of us, Mailsmith is the biggest bargin the Mac has to offer.

MacUpdate needs to remove the tagline, "Robust email client from the makers of BBEdit." Barebones, the makers of BBEdit, transferred ownership of Mailsmith to Stickshift Software in 2009!! To continue to "tout" this app as a Barebones product is ridiculous and misleading.

Tried it, didn't like it. The user interface looks like it was designed to around the time Mac OS X 10.2 or 10. 3. It looks like Mailsmith only supports the antiquated POP protocol as I cannot find any support for IMAP or Exchange protocols in Mailsmith's accounts section. The product hasn't been updated since 2011 so I can only assume that the developer is no longer supporting the product and that partly the reason why it is free now. A reviewer below (kingjj) said that this product was to the most expensive Mac mail client around before the license was changed to free. If I had of paid for this product I would be slightly cheesed off with the last of basic level of support for standard email protocols.

Confusing and un-user friendly as a whole. Even the latest pre-release version crashes every minute or so. Trashed and doubt if I'll give it another try.

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.

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.