Mailsmith 2.0.1 review

With Apple's Mail improving with each successive release, it could be argued that there's no need to buy another email application.

However, Mail does have a few shortcomings. Its filtering and searching capabilities are basic, it tends to choke on mailboxes with more than a few hundred messages in them, and its handling of spam is rudimentary.

This means there is an opening in the market for a powerful email program, which Bare Bones aims to fill with Mailsmith. Based on the core text-handling engine of BBEdit, Mailsmith is designed to appeal to the kind of person who sets up multiple filters and gets hundreds of emails per day. It's also the most flexible and powerful email application we've yet come across.

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However, it's worth mentioning

that there are two limitations to Mailsmith that will rule it out for some users. The first is that there's no support for IMAP mail. This product supports POP3 email only, which, although much more common than IMAP, is not always supported by every email account.

Secondly, there is no direct support for HTML-formatted mail - Mailsmith is devoutly text-only.

For most users, this will actually be more of a benefit than a drawback, as HTML mail is the spammer's preferred method of confirming whether an email address is live. If snazzy email formatting matters, then Mailsmith won't be the product for you.

As would be expected, though, Mailsmith will handle any number of POP3 email accounts, and its text editing tools are second to none. Mailsmith includes BBEdit's Text menu, allowing you to perform such handy tasks as rewrapping text and zapping gremlin characters quickly and easily.

But the strongest feature of Mailsmith is undoubtedly its filtering, which is immensely powerful. Filters can be attached to mailboxes, so that any mail matching the filter criteria is moved into that box, or they can simply be left 'loose', and perform a huge variety of actions. The set of criteria you can use to decide whether an action should be applied is enormous, with everything from whether a piece of mail has a particular sender through to whether it has been replied to.

Because Mailsmith also includes the search engine from BBEdit, you can even perform filtering based on the powerful Grep Unix syntax, as well as comprehensive and more easily understandable pop-up menu options. Any matching emails can have a huge range of actions performed on them, including setting status, saving attachments, moving or copying to a mailbox, and even having an AppleScript launched to further handle the email. No matter what way you want to filter your email, Mailsmith will be able to handle it.

Searching is equally powerful. Using the Advanced Search option, you can apply multiple levels of criteria to your searches, making it easy to find virtually any email you've ever had (and Mailsmith can handle multiple mailboxes with thousands of messages, without

you experiencing the kind of sluggishness that plagues Mail).

If you can remember that you're after an email that either Bill or Ben sent you about Project X, and that it wasn't sent to Fred, you can find it within seconds.

Stop the spam

Happily, this version of Mailsmith supports Apple's Address Book. You can now type the first few letters of any entry in Address Book in the address field when creating an email, and Mailsmith will fill in the rest for you. The only drawback with this is that it's not easy to use if a contact has multiple addresses, as it uses only the first one. You can, however, open up Address Book and use its Send Email pop-up to create new emails in Mailsmith instead.