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.

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.