Mailsmith for Mac

2.4.3

2.4.3

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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.

Doesn't open in Yosemite.

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.

I really love MailSmith and hope that it stay what it is: A tool for the pros. There are enough tool/apps with blinking elements and funny popups but without all the features needed by the pros. Mailsmith is the ONLY mail program I know (and I have tested a lot if not all for Mac) that can handle my 420 SMTP accounts combined with just 1 POP3 account. It can pass all my mails through my own scripts using the shell. It's one of really few clients that displays raw content without all these stupid HTML-Elements. If you request HTML you also want to have a build security hole. I don't want my mail in HTML. And Mailsmith is really fast. I have over 5000 mails in my archives and can search in < 30sec in all these mails for any term. Summed up: Mailsmith is for the pros. If you search an 'app' don't use this as this program provides features not fun. Without some knowledge in POP3,SMTP,Shell,RegEx.. you possibly even don't know what to do with all these features. Bought this years ago for a lot of money and although it's free now I don't regret that I payed for it.

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.

It is my understanding that this email client will Not do IMAP. Is this true? Obviously this would be a disadvantage to people that use imap (this should be everyone btw).

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.

Release notes are here: http://www.mailsmith.org/support/mailsmith/arch_notes_23.html

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

Great application. And fast too... But, please, add IMAP support...

...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.

Mailsmith is Freeware!

Developer, can you please add the option to sort all messages in the inbox by EMAIL ADDRESS, not just by "sender"? I run a business, and deal with hundreds of different customers every day. I need to sort by email address! Can you please add an optional "Email" column? You'll be my hero! I'm sure that countless other people would also appreciate this sorting option. If you add that option, I will buy the program immediately. Thank you!

I'm also a fan of BareBones and purchased Mailsmith back when Mail was very slow. I would likely consider going back if it supported imap. I believe there are several open source libraries to do imap, so don't quite understand the lack of this support still at this time.

This version crashes on launch on my MacBook Pron (Mac OSX 10.5.8).

Hi. I like Barebone's apps. Text Wrangler is awesome as is BBEDIT for serious work. I would like to comment to Barebones about releasing a previous paid for app as free. It is a nice gesture that the app is now free. email is something that for most of us here is indispensable. To offer up this previous paid app for free is nice but allot of us would like to know what the future is for the app. Are you planning to make a paid version? Are you planning to keep the free version? Are you going to open source the code? Basically even a free mail client requires a commitment to maintain before most of us will be willing to switch. Because lets face it at some point we are going to have huge archives and if there is no support for issues the whole thing will be useless. I don't want to rain on your parade. Quite the opposite actually. This happens to be what I first thought of when I saw this here. Wow that's great but what happens in 6 months if I do switch to Mailsmith? Mail.app will still be supported, even if there are glaring bugs. Will Mailsmith? email apps are different from most anything else. BBedit is a great tool but if tomorrow it stopped getting support (God forbid) all the work will be readable in something else. Unlike mail clients where its more difficult to move your archives over should it stop getting support.

From what I understand, Stickshift Software, LLC was created by a person (or people) from Bare Bones. As has been mentioned, it seems to be a case of too little too late. I purchased Mailsmith years ago. IMO it was worth it considering the alternative email clients back then, and the inclusion of SpamSieve. After 4 years without any updates this new version is available, now free of charge, but I have no desire to go back to Mailsmith. Once upon a time Mailsmith and PowerMail were two of the best email clients on the Mac platform. PowerMail's fast searches were impressive, and Mailsmith's sophisticated filtering/processing/scripting is great for power users dealing with text-based email. It's great to see a new release, but I'll keep on using Entourage.

Looks like it's not even a Bare Bones product anymore. I'll be keeping an eye on the product because of its former grandeur, but the product essentially outright died, due to it being pretty much abandoned by BBSW for years and years (without them even having the courtesy of telling their users it was a dead product, maintaining the pretense it was still alive and being worked upon) ... and in the interim, the entire world of e-mail has made huge, giant leaps forward. I'll be downloading it to see what the 2.2 iteration turned out to be like, but I don't expect much from this formerly notable client. The changes would have to be mindboggingly and unexpectedly revolutionary.

FREE brings the rating, despite lack of some features, right up to the top of my email client list! Always liked Mailsmith, never wanted to pay that much for any email client. This is a fantastic product.

No IMAP support sinks its relevance to me. Too bad, too - I always enjoy BareBones interfaces.

Too little, too late. I've moved on.

Finally universal and now even for free but maybe too late for the most of us (former Mailsmith users and beta testers)! :-( Christian Bürli [macparc.ch & macfix.de]

As with all Bare Bones products this is slick and sophisticated underneath a simple interface. It would be nice to see a spelling dictionary incorporated into the next version e.g. the one Camino Browser integrates is a godsend. Being able to correct words as you type them instead of going up and running spelling is a serious time saver.

I've used most of the main email clients for the Mac over the past four or five years. Every now and again, something will wind up not satisfying me (none of them are PERFECT, after all - at least not perfect for ME - and if they were, then they almost certainly wouldn't be perfect for someone else), and I'll switch to another client. Usually, I'll be pleasantly surprised to remember some of the good things about that "new" client that I'd forgotten. It's a bit like starting to date an old girlfriend again - you're reminded of all the great things about her. But it isn't until a while in (usually just AFTER you've given her the keys to your apartment again) that you start remembering the not-so-good things, the things that made you want to break up in the first place. I've had this sort of serially monogamous relationship with various email clients. But I have to say that over time, the one with the fewest glaring flaws turns out to be Mailsmith. A lot of people make a big fuss over Mailsmith's lack of IMAP support and a few other perceived failings. I look at it the other way: their press release says that they tried to properly implement IMAP, and wound up giving it up because they couldn't make it work to THEIR standards. They don't go into detail, but it's quite clear that they feel either IMAP is less secure inherently, or the idea of being more or less permanently connected to various IMAP servers poses its own potential security risk. Either way, the tone is clear: they're not adopting it because IMAP isn't up to THEIR standards. Will that drive off some potential customers? Clearly, it already has. Does it make the bigwigs or the developers at BareBones Arrogant Bastards? Yeah, it probably does. But the funny thing about Arrogant Bastards is that history judges them based upon how right they were, not whether they were arrogant. I kinda look at the brain trust behind Mailsmith as the Jello Biafras of email client developers: arrogant, sure - but usually right, even if it pisses you off a little to admit it. If you can get over the VERY spartan interface (no customizable toolbars, very little color) and the all-performance, no-frills approach, you will find you've got what remains possibly the best Macintosh email client on the market today - and that's WITH the famous lack of updates from BareBones. Why don't they update it? When you get something right the first time you do it, why tinker? How long was the Lamborghini Countach on the market? Ten years? Twelve? It might not be your kind of car, but you have to admit they pretty much got it right the first time. What sets Mailsmith apart are three things: the scriptability, searchability and the filtering. Both are literally unmatched, despite some of the reviews which say that Apple's Mail is catching up. It isn't. Filters can be attached to any number of mailboxes in any configuration, restructured so that they run in different orders within each mailbox, you name it. I have no idea how many hours they must have spent working to make Mailsmith as scriptable as it is, but I shudder to think. If you're a tweaker, or someone with large and/or complex email needs, you can do more - FAR more - with Mailsmith than with any other email client out there for the Mac. Oh, and one other thing: Mailsmith was actually THE FIRST program which came bundled with SpamSieve. Why? Because Michael Tsai at c-command (makers of SpamSieve) probably believed that pairing his best-in-class Bayesian spam filter with the best-in-class Mac email client made perfect sense (just guessing, here - I don't know Mr. Tsai). But the two of them are a powerful combination, indeed. If you're someone who's looking for a lot of neat-colored icons and pretty HTML-rendering capacity, then this isn't the email client for you. But if you're interested in the Mac's best program for the handling of email, then look no further than Mailsmith.

Downloaded and am using for trial period. I am on an Intel mac, so it runs in emulation mode. Even so, it is reasonably quick. It has some excellent filtration capabilities, but Apple mail and Gyazmail are catching up there. Also, with MailTags (I know, it is an add-on) you can really add some searchability to Apple mail. The other two products also interface with SpamSieve. Sorry that this has become more of a comparison than a review of Mailsmith for it's own value, but the problem is that the developers have left it sit unchanged for 2 years now. And for $99 it is not worth it. - No IMAP - Filtering not too far ahead of Apple Mail - SpamSieve supports Apple Mail Another review questioned the lack of html viewing, I actually like that and consider it a feature. Just hit the WEB button and you can see the HTML message in your browser. My overall rating is 3, because it is a stagnant product that is losing ground fast. Features, 3... lacking IMAP, Non-universal, and should propably be updated to make use of more recent improvements in the operating system. Ease of use, 4... it is easy to use, what can I say. Value, 2... when you an do 90% of what Mailsmith can do with Apple Mail, why pay $99? With the addition of something like MailTags, you are still spending less but gaining some capabilities. And soon Leopard will be released and Mail will have even more advanced features. Stability, 5... no problems running the application and in daily use... even tho' it is a PPC app on an intel computer.

One and a half years and no update. It shows this company has forgotten about this product. By now it trails by far behind other mail apps. BareBones rather spends time on big buzz apps Yojimbo. What a shame for a $99 price tag! It's only plus points left are the comprehensive filters and the overall stability.

SOS! Please add the option to sort all messages in the inbox by EMAIL ADDRESS, not just by "sender." Why is this not a standard sorting option? I run a business, and deal with hundreds of different customers every day. I need to sort by email address! I'm sure that countless other businesses would LOVE this sorting option. Thank you!

No IMAP? How can a mac browser "by mac users, for mac users" not support .Mac? I haven't had a POP email account in years. I know that's not typical, but I'm a power user, and I thought that's who this app was targeted at. Certainly, I would consider it a bare minimum for a $99 email client. Come on, guys. Lower the price, fix your app, or take it off the market. In my book, a $99 mail app without IMAP is a crime against software.

Yeah, well PINE "just works" as well -- doesnt mean you should use it as your Mac mail client, though.

It just works.

yeah, whatever. still no imap.

Is it really that hard to add IMAP support? The BareBones folks dont even seem to be trying with this application.

I forgot to add a fifth omission - threading. For me it is no great loss as the contributors to lists I frequent tend to mess up threading sooner or later anyway, but I suspect that others will be more worried.

At first view Mailsmith would seem to have four serious, if not fatal, shortcomings; no IMAP support, no Unicode support, no HTML email composition and high cost. In addition the user interface is austere and potentially unwelcoming - few wizards and no icons or animations. Given all that, why do I like it so much? Because it is phenomenally efficient at processing large volumes of mail - several hundred a day from several accounts in my case. The keyboard support is complete, so the whole interface is navigable without the mouse and takes relatively little learning. The filtering and integration with SpamSieve is so impressive it "just works" - I estimate I am saving a good 15 or 20 minutes per day over Entourage 2004 on that alone. And, most importantly, much of the BBEdit text handling has been carried across, so malformed incoming emails can be tidied up with a couple of keypresses; the option to reflow badly quoted text is a lifesaver. (Incoming HTML email is parsed and displayed as text only with a link to display the original email in the default browser). The program is not for everyone; if you require IMAP or use multiple languages look elsewhere. But what it does it does so well there is no real competition.

Bare Bones - don't even post this anymore until it has IMAP. It's embarassing. (for you)

I've been holding off trying Mailsmith since OSX obliged me to give up Claris Emailer. I've been fully prepared to love Mailsmith and bite the bullet on paying for it - but I set it up and found it does not support IMAP. My loathing of Apple's poor IMAP support in Mail.app is one of the chief things driving me away, so I'm extremely disappointed.

By Zack Williams, Tucson Macintosh Users Group member I've used a variety of mail clients over the years, and Mailsmith seems like a throwback to an earlier time for me. In chronological order of usage, I've used Pine, FirstClass, Netscape 3 and 4, various versions of Outlook, Eudora, Mozilla Thunderbird, and several webmail clients, with Google's Gmail being the newest. Mailsmith is a lean, text only email client with very good filtering engine. And thats about it. For example, you can set up a very complex set of filters to sort out your mail into different categories based on a wide range of criteria, and take a large range of actions on the email messages. These features work very well, and you can do complex things like autoreplies based on the content of a message, with customization of the reply via an applescript or unix program. This sort of functionality would work very well for people with complex email processing needs. I did have some problems with the program. Searching the same corpus of email for a single word is considerably slower than other programs, and pops up a dialog box and a search results window, cluttering the screen. Screen clutter is a major problem in this program - everything pops open a new window. Mailsmith doesn't support the newer IMAP mail protocol, which allows the mail client to keep mail files on the server. There is no option to thread email conversations. Importation of previous mail files worked fine from Mail.app, but didn't work correctly with files from my Mozilla Mail client. The "Keep on server" option didn't work correctly - it repeatedly downloading the same email messages. In terms of security, Mailsmith supports encrypted POP and SMTP connections, but on a message level only supports commercial PGP 8.0 (with third party scripts for GPG support). S/MIME isn't supported, unlike Mail.app and Mozilla. On a 10 point scale, I'd give Mailsmith a 3 as a general purpose mail program, and a 8 if you need scripting/filtering features. It's far behind the times compared to other mail clients, and other than a few specific filtering features it doesn't differentiate itself from the crowd. The cluttered (and frankly, ugly) user interface, slow searching, and lack of support for common features make the program frustrating to use. The fact that Bare Bones charges $100 for it is even more embarrassing, when most mail programs are available for free or at a minimal cost.

When, oh when will this get IMAP? It looks interesting, but I'm not going to even bother downloading an email client that I couldn't possibly use.

Used it since version 1.0. It can be a little slow when you have 10s of thousands of messages, but it's stable, flexible, and offers unparalleled text editing.

Who cares about IMAP! I don't use it. Mailsmith is perfect for my needs.

I can't understand why they STILL don't do IMAP. It's not that hard. I love BBEdit; I use it all day everyday. Bare Bones makes good stuff, and I'm sure this is a good mail app, but I can't use it because it doesn't do IMAP.

Why bother, there is NO IMAP support. I stopped using POP3 years ago and will NOT go back regardless of the email application. Why add all these features and IGNORE the need and requests for IMAP support? Whatever.

I used this for almost a year. I love the features, but performance was really disappointing once I accumulated a lot of mail. Moving back to Apple's Mail.app was like a breath of fresh air. There's no reason it should take so long to delete my daily spam in Mailsmith.

New version, still no IMAP....

MailSmith is by far the best email client for Mac OS X. You will not find the filtering, querying and numerous other powerful features in Mail.app, Entourage or Eudora. Great developers, too, at Bare Bones.

bottom line, use Entourage, which kicks ass in every aspect.

Very nice program with useful features, but it's totally let down by lack of IMAP support. It's pricey and I may consider spending the money, but not without IMAP. I contacted Bare Bones almost six months ago and they said IMAP support was coming. It's still not here, so when is it coming? Almost all other email clients has it so what's so hard about doing it, I wonder?

Mailsmith sounds like a good idea, but it, like BBEdit, falls into a no-mans land of being too bloated and slow for the techie crowd, and too complex and obtuse for the 'power users'. Anyone likely to use it is probably better off using mutt, along with the editor of their choice, or Mail.app/PowerMail/Mulberry.

I have more than 60000 mails in near 80 mailboxes. mailsmith is fast & robust. superb filter and search function. I miss nothing in the current version!

I wrote a very positive review for Mailsmith and featurewise this review is absolutely correct. I have now about 30.000 Mails in around 50 Mailboxes and Mailsmith is so f****** slow, that I don't want to use it anymore. I hate to say that, but it sucks on performance in every aspect. Fetching mail is about 3 to 4 times slower than with Mail.app, switching between mailboxes and even filtering spam is also a very big issue. I would love to use Mailsmith in future but I can't recommend the current version because of it sluggish behaviour in nearly every part of the program (fetching, filtering with a bit larger mailboxes (more than 1000 messages), switching between mailboxes and so on. When you compare search performance to Mail.app or - even better - PowerMail you get tears in your eyes. Even fast search in one mailbox is horrible slow, now "queries" are available (like in Entourage or Mail.app). Last, but not least: the mail database is about 30% larger than the same (!!) mails in Mail.app. BareBones says, this is because of many indexes they have. But if the have indexing, why is Mailsmith so sluggish? It's obvious that BareBones has currently a really bad database implementation and - if you see the price - this is an insolence. So, Mailsmith slows me absolutely down with it's overall performance. It boosts my productivity a bit with very intelligent and unique features, but overall it slows me down by a view minutes per day. If you add this up it will come to three or four hours a month. And this way to much to tolerate. No, I'm switching back to Mail.app, not sure whether I will stay there but's it is good enough and every good mail application can import the data. Perhaps I come back to Mailsmith when the have version with a database that deserves the name. Again: nearly all my pain with Mailsmith comes from horrible database efficiency.

No IMAP? 99? As great as it is, without IMAP it definitely is not worth the money. Why is Mailsmith still lacking IMAP? It really makes poor business sense. Bare Bones says it will be added in the near future. Until then Mulberry is the way to go. Maybe Mulberry is the sleeping giant for OS X email. The price is right, very reliable, support is excellent, and the price is reasonable. If you want great value for your money go with Mulberry. When Mailsmith wakes up, it might be too late.

Mailsmith has the potential to be the best email client for OS X. However, without IMAP it is just a tease.........

No IMAP support? Wow and $99. I'm scared.

Best of the lot if you have a ton of emails to sort and need some extra filtering options for various newsgroups. You can do anything you want with this app. I'm using Powermail 5 right now, though, just to see if it's getting any where near the functionality of Mailsmith. It's okay so far. The best thing going for it is still the price (at least for a paid email client) and the lightning-fast searches. I have a feeling that I'm going to be sticking with Mailsmith, though, at the end of the trial period. But definitely, Mailsmith is not for everyone.

Some very unique and useful features. Spamseive compliments it wonderfully. Regex filters are very handy. Then it's got it's quirky side. Ahhh, to have a cross between this and Mail!

I downloaded the demo and tried using it. Now I'm not some computer newbie. I spent 6 years designing ERP software for Tier 1 aerospace and defense companies and I've been using personal computers since 1986. I've used about two dozen email clients in that time and have demoed dozens more. I could not get this app to send an email to save my life. How hard can setting up a pop3 account be? With mailsmith, evidently pretty hard because after spending about 30 minutes trying all kinds of things I gave up and deleted the program. I'm with the anonymous reviewer above. It might be a great program but first, if you're an experienced email client user and you can't structure an account and get the app ready to go in about 5 minutes, then there's something wrong with the app. Second, and I realize this is a style issue so tastes will differ, i found the interface to be, um, let's call it 'plain' to be charitable. I see and hear people bitch about Entourage X but my main complaint with it was spam handling and I fixed that by downloading and installing the same spam filter (SpamSieve) that mailsmith uses. Entourage seems to do everything I need, including complex rule sets, indentured folder structures, etc... And i had it up and running in about 3 minutes. maybe it's just the way I learn and the way mailsmith is constructed. It's obviously a quality app, a lot of smart people use it and love it, but dang, mailsmith and I never even got to first base. oh wel..

The best e-mail client I found. And I tested every single one on Mac OS X ... including the commandline clients.

Well, you could use the entirely free Mail.app developed by Apple, or you could pay $99 to use this app. In my opinion it is no better than Mail.app, so why would you pay $99 for it?

I have started using it since 2.1 and like it very much. I got sick of HTML emails coming in and having to see things I didn't wish to see. This program is as simple as you need it to be, or if you want to go nuts with it you can. I recommend anyone downloading and giving it a shot.

Seems like it would be a good app if I could figure out how to use it. Seems unnecessarily complicated and even though the manual is 215 pages long that only make it more complicated instead of less. It has a lot more features than most other mail apps but those are useless if they aren't intuitive to use. It also seems slow and had lots of error messages but again that could be because I had no idea of how to use it. My biggest complaint is in trying the demo it did something with my mail that cleared it off the server. This is probably a preference setting but as I said, its complicated and I can't figure out how to put it back so I can return to using OSX mail. I certainly wouldn't download it or buy it unless I had ALOT of printer paper for the manual and a few days to figure out how to use it.

Olli, I generally don't do that, but I thank you for mentionning, the Bat!, wich really is one of the sing I miss the most under Mac. I hope this Moldavian developper will port its jewel to Mac. I stopped hoping Barebones will support IMAP one day.

Its icon reminds me BBEdit. It is definitely a copy of BBEdit colors.

I recently switched from pc to mac and used Apple's Mail.app, which is nice and easy to use, but not quite what I like. I used "THE BAT" on my PC, which is comparable to Mailsmith, I'd say. The most important thing for me is that you have different possibilities of encoding attachments (or enclosures). Files with data and resource fork used to arrive not at all or messed up when I sent them to PC-, Linux-, or Unix-Users because of Apple's Double encoding. Now with a choice of AppleDouble (duh!), AppleSinge, Base64, BinHex, and UUcode my attachments arrive the way the should w/o the need of compressing them before sending. A lot of features already have been discribed before so I won't do that again. It's just a very well balanced program. Still easy to use, but very powerful. The only and BIG DOWNSIDE of this product is, that the price isn't $69 as posted up there in the info coloumn. It's $99 for a single user license and $79 for students. Now and that's *explixit*ed up and the reason, why I only give two of five points for value. Unfortunately I haven't found any email-client being comparable to this product. So I might just swith back to Apple-Mail and keep complaining about having to compress my attachments and the lack of hard wrapped line breaks after 72 characters...

For those who are committed to IMAP, this is still not the best solution. For those who are NOT committed to IMAP, this is, hands down, the best email client around. I've been using this since 1.0, and it's always had a great feature set, but with some drawbacks (mostly speed) that I could see justifying the choice of another email client. No longer--the changes for 2.0 are spectacular!

Still no IMAP support? You have to be kidding me! That's part of the reason I stopped using Claris Emailer (now THAT was a great email program). This may have some nice features, but I can't use it with its limited support for simplistic protocols.

Anonymous (below) has written just about everything I could in praise of Mailsmith. It's a simple, powerful app that does the job VERY well.

Good grief - I'm sorry but the previous reviewers have no idea what they are talking about. Mailsmith is simply the most powerful and configurable email client available for the Mac. Its like BBedit on email. I bet they don't even know what BBEdit is, lol. :-) Look folks, its not pretty pictures and dip-do-la-lee. This is email, powerful, well done. You been around the block a few hundred times and get tired of the toys, try out Mailsmith and get your work done. :-) I'm one of the folks who used Mailsmith in classic before it was available for OSX. I'm so incredibly happy Bare Bones has decided to at least keep it alive. Maintenance updates, too - thats really nice and appreciated. Bare Bones, a lot of us who have been around since the beginning of all this internet hoopla really apprecaite your down-to-earth product. Thank goodness for Mailsmith, is all I can say. I can't fathom having to sort and filter my 500+ email messages every week without it. Searching is fast and precise. Scripting? This app asks, "how high?" This app kicks tail, period. No contest-no competitors come close to this sweet baby. Please, please BareBones..keep this alive. I don't know how sales have been but it is an absolute godsend. Thanks so much for all your hard work. I'm so tired of Outlook Express people. No offense..its not their fault they don't know any better. :-)

I bought it but wish I hadn't. Some good features (search, filters) but overall not a finished product. Incomplete documentation leaves out a lot. Some bugs, really poor script recording support, some features aren't scriptable. They will probably get it finished about version 3.1 but have the nerve to charge for several upgrades along the way.

Testing mailsmith the last few days - I find myself a bit disappointed. It sounds impressive on paper but the app opens up to an almost button free window much like the feeling you get with an untitled document. One main thing that I want it to do for me is to automatically print certain filtered email. I see nothing built in for this. Lame. Even Outlook Express has this as a built in feature in it's "rule" options. Maybe this can be done through applescript somehow. Can't developers at least duplicate bacic functions of their competitors? I do like the "get info" style selection to associate filters that mainly drop incoming messages into the selected folder/mailbox. My gut tells me it should be better than Powermail except that would have no basis in logic. A quick glance at Powermail also shows a lack of auto printing of mail.

WAY overpriced. Other than that, nice feature set, clean interface. Best text editing features in any e-mail client, lacking some more advanced mailing features (like editing of from-address in outgoing mails). If you want a full-featured e-mail client for a good price, try SweetMail.