PowerMail 5 review

PowerMail has, as the name suggests, always been a powerful mail application for users who demand more than the Mail client bundled with Mac OS X can deliver.

The fifth major release of the application manages to add features, particularly for reducing spam, while actually making it easier to use for novices.

Strangely, given that Apple gives away a perfectly good mail client with every copy of OS X, there are several paid-for program around that aim to fill niches that Mail can't squeeze into. Although Mail works perfectly well for most users, if your life revolves around email - or if you simply want more features - it's not quite enough.

PowerMail is certainly packed full of features that will please power-hungry users. The filtering system is extremely good, allowing you to create actions based on numbers of recipients, whether you received the mail as a CC or BCC, whether the content contains HTML, and just about everything you could possibly imagine. Available actions include displaying routing to other email addresses, displaying alerts, or even executing an AppleScript. This makes PowerMail more of a mail processor than a simple browser for email, capable of handling virtually any kind of mail task.

For users with huge volumes of email that need to be stored, the search features alone could justify the price of the product. Simple searches can be done from the browser window, with a field at top-right for quick searching in a way similar to that of Mail. However, if you want something more complex, PowerMail can do that too: you can create searches that look for multiple items, such as keywords, date sent or received, sender, and account sent to. This means that finding a particular email from someone that you think was sent in the past month is very simple, and very quick.

There are also a lot of small but helpful touches to PowerMail that elevate it above free clients. You can, for example, create your own custom attribution line for replies, and number the subject lines (so that it reads "Re(2):", "Re(3):" and so on). And PowerMail synchronises with the OS X Address Book, so you don't have to worry about keeping a separate list of email addresses in each application.

The most important improvement in this version is full integration with SpamSieve, which is one of the best programs on the Mac for dealing with the ever-present problem of junk mail. Not only can you mark and unmark messages as spam within PowerMail to train SpamSieve, but the scoring system it uses to weed out junk mail is transparent to PowerMail. This means that you can use PowerMail's filters, which have always been among the most potent of any mail client, to do things with spam depending on how highly it scores. For example, it's easy to set up a filter which puts messages that score just above the limits you set in a 'Spam to check' folder, which you could glance through occasionally to look for false positives. You can also raise or lower a message's spam rating, allowing you to easily reduce the rating of something from a mailing list that you know gets no spam at all.

Like Apple's Mail, PowerMail handles both POP3 and IMAP4 connections. Although PowerMail's behaviour with POP3 was impeccable, its IMAP implementation shows some signs of occasional errant behaviour. We found that every now and then it would simply stop talking to an IMAP server correctly, by refusing to purge deleted messages, and on one occasion when quitting the application it hung while disconnecting from the server. And there appears to be no way to get the integration with SpamSieve working with an IMAP account: although you can mark messages in an IMAP folder as spam, when receiving them it doesn't send them to SpamSieve for processing.