First, it does a great job of extracting the non-HTML content from messages and displaying this in the message window. But if all you need to do is view the occasional stray piece of non-spam HTML mail, Mailsmith can do it fine. If your mail consists largely of spam, or if the majority of your correspondence is with people who can't express themselves adequately in a single font, well, Mailsmith might not be the best choice for you. To be sure, it does not encourage HTML e-mail. On the other hand, Mailsmith does support full-blown, properly formed HTML messages.
If someone sends you an enriched-text message, Mailsmith will display it as plain text. Mailsmith does not display "enriched text," that is, font and simple paragraph formatting that may have been added to a message that was written in a program such as Apple's OS X Mail. Integration with the Address Book is so smooth, it's nearly invisible. The POP Monitor, improved in version 2, lets you view messages directly on the server and get them or delete them.īy default now, Mailsmith 2 uses the OS X Address Book to store e-mail addresses. (See Figure 1.) If you have PGP 8 or higher installed, Mailsmith 2 added the ability to cryptographically sign outgoing messages. Version 2.x adds a number of valuable new features, including secure (SSL) connections, SMTP authentication, the ability to delete messages from the server after n days, faster uploading and downloading, improved handling of signatures, and more. Usernames and passwords can be stored in the OS X Keychain. You can, of course, have as many different user accounts as you like, each independently configured. That said, Mailsmith 2.1 gives you a lot of control over your POP and SMTP accounts. But, at the moment, Mailsmith is aimed at the ninety-plus percent of us that don't need IMAP.įigure 1. Bare Bones says that IMAP support is on the list for a future version.
One option Mailsmith does not give you: IMAP. I touch my mouse very little when I'm working in Mailsmith. What I particularly like is the ability to add or edit your own keyboard shortcuts, not just for every command in the menus, but also for palette items such as glossaries, stationery, and scripts. Window size, text wrap on/off, where your favorite AppleScript editor is located, a slew of options relating to spam, attribution line for text quoted in replies-you can control all these, and more. You can change fonts, font colors, and font sizes for lists, for reading messages, for composing messages, for printing. There are different ways to view mail lists and messages. Let me start by noting that there's a lot you can do to customize the way Mailsmith looks, how it works, and how you interact with it. I'm going to focus on how you, the power user, can make Mailsmith do your bidding. But in this review, I am not going to focus on what's new. If you want all the details, you can get them from Bare Bones' web site. In fact, in versions 2.0 (released fall 2003) and 2.1 (released January 2004), in addition to hundreds of problem fixes, Bare Bones added hundreds of new features or feature enhancements, including PGP support, considerably enhanced integration with OS X, native support for SpamSieve, greatly improved notification options (even support for the Griffin PowerMate), changes to the default mailbox structure, and much more. I am also going to assume that you are not already using Mailsmith, and that you may need more than just a rundown of what's new in 2.x. I want to describe it more aggressively, as an e-mail client written by control freaks for control freaks.
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Bare Bones, developer and publisher of Mailsmith, describes it as an e-mail client written by Mac users for Mac users. I am going to make the not unreasonable assumption that you are a power user, programmer, hacker and/or geek, that you are, in short, a control freak. It's not.īut I am writing this article for MacTech. I would go out of my way to claim that it isn't just for power users, programmers, hackers and geeks. If I were writing this review for MacHome, or even MacWorld, I'd spend time talking about how smart and user-friendly Mailsmith is.