Mailsmith
Apple Mail is nice. Its interface is really, really pretty. But in terms of functionality, it’s pretty much on par with Claris Em@iler. And Emailer died about a decade ago. Sure, Apple Mail has better Spam filtering, but back in Emailer’s day 10 messages was considered a lot of spam. Times have changed.
Enter Bare Bones Software’s Mailsmith. It’s a powerful app, it has the text search engines used in BBEdit. I like BBEdit. I like a lot. So I’m considering switching. I’ve barely scratched the surface of Mailsmith and I already like what I see. For one thing, I don’t have to resort to the defaults command to get my messages set in MPW 9pt with no Anti-Aliasing.
There are a couple of jarring adjustments, though. Mailsmith isn’t pretty. It’s not ugly, but it’s very much reminiscent of the older, System 7 design school. And while I remember System 7 fondly, it’s a little incongruous to find that school of design wielding an Aqua paintbrush. But, it’s the filtering and the editing that counts here, prettiness is entirely secondary. Second, Mailsmith doesn’t actually do any spam filtering, it farms that job out to SpamSieve. SpamSieve has a really good reputation, and it even works with Apple Mail, so who knows, even if this flirtation with Mailsmith doesn’t work out, I might end up keeping SpamSieve.
But, the one thing that blew me away and necessitated this post was a small button in the preferences. Mailsmith has the same interface for preferences as BBEdit, which is fine, I like that interface. And, unsurprisingly, it has the same ‘Text Colors’ interface as BBEdit, including the ability to use different colours for different levels of quoted text. Which, to be fair Apple Mail has (as did Emailer — and, I suppose, others — before it) and it has a ‘Set to Factory Defaults’ button that resets the colours, just like BBEdit. The really, really cool thing is the other button: ‘Set Emailer Colors’, which, as you’ve probably guessed, set the quote colours to those used by Emailer.
It’s not so much the fact that I can use Emailer’s colours, I’m really not terribly picky about the colours of my quted text so long as the levels of quotation are differentiated. It’s the fact that they added a button specifically to set the same behaviour as Emailer. Thus showing due respect to The Greatest Email Client I Ever Used. I thought that was neat.
