inluminent

I finally did it. I broke down and bought Mailsmith.

I used Mailsmith 1.0 and 1.5 when OS X was first released, because Apple’s Mail.app was utterly horrible, and I received a free NFR copy because I was working for a small Macintosh news site at the time… and Bare Bones saw fit to give us a copy for review… so I reviewed it and fell in love (the review was never published).

But then, Apple’s Mail got better with Jaguar, and even better with Panther, but this past week something in Mail broke. I don’t know why or what and can’t really explain the problems I’m having with Mail other than to say that after reading and deleting 4-5 emails, Mail.app crashes for no apparent reason. Happens every time I fire it up. And the Junk-mail filters just quit working, so now, I’m getting 100+ junk mails in my in-box… perhaps MyDoom is to blame for Mail.app crapping out on me…

So, I figured I’d switch back over to Mailsmith until I could figure out the problem with Mail.app. Within 5 minutes of using Mailsmith 1.5, I was in love again (and yes, I love BBEdit, and I think that’s what drives my fascination with Mailsmith). So, I zipped over to Bare Bones.com to buy the latest version of Mailsmith, and guess what? It comes free with SpamSieve from Michael Tsai, too. Woohoo!

And now, I’m Mailsmith happy again, and not getting any more spam, and loving it. I guess the coolest part is that Mailsmith 2.x picked up all of my old 1.5 settings and preferences, and imported all of my email from Mail.app with no problems… And now I don’t have to read HTML email anymore either. What a bonus.

Thanks Bare Bones.

And no, folks, I don’t think $99 is too much to pay for a mail client, espectially when you work ‘in your email client’ as much as I do.

Further Reading: You Have New Mail [from daringfireball.net] and True Confessions of a Mailsmith Switcher [from Tidbits]