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OS X Email Client Showdown
Posted by: Miguel Danielson on Thursday, April 04, 2002 - 08:36 AM
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In this OSXGuide Showdown, we take a closer look at several powerful email clients for OS X. As OS X has reached the age of one year old, the number of quality email clients available for the OS has gone from zero to a handful or so of very good quality clients. In this comparison we will not be looking at Microsoft's Entourage, since in the author's opinion, it is not a viable solution due to it's current slowness and reported instability (resulting in corrupt databases and data loss). If you're looking to transition from Entourage to another client, then this Showdown will be especially interesting for you.
The Players In this Showdown we'll be looking at three non-Microsoft email clients: Eudora 5.1b21, Mailsmith 1.5, and PowerMail 3.1.2. In these trials, we used either an unlimited beta (in the case of Eudora), or unlimited time-constrained demo copies of the software, so our results should be precisely what you get with the full program.
Mailsmith 1.5 Hot off the presses, Mailsmith 1.5 is the latest entry from everyone's favorite text editor maker, Bare Bones Software. As the makers of BBEdit, you know you can expect reliability, powerful functionality, and a high quality product from Mailsmith. The program delivers on all of these points, but may fall short for some users.
Mailsmith had very quick message browsing -- something that can be slowed down by OS X's Aqua interface, but which was not a problem for Mailsmith since it does not employ Aqua's processor intensive anti-aliasing by default. Mailsmith also features some really hand functionality that cannot be seen elsewhere. For example, each email message has an associated "note" where you can type messages related to that note. This seems like a really hand way to deal with any thoughts you might want to keep track of, that are related to a particular email message. Mailsmith also has a Spamcop features that allows you to, with one click of the button, report any spam you receive to an anti-spam service that will track the sender and attempt to ban it from sending messages in the future. You just need to sign up for a free spam reporting account with SpamCop before utilizing this feature.
Mailsmith certainly has power. It's grep-like searching allows you greater power and control over searching through emails. You can search for strings of text that follow a certain pattern, rather than a direct match that is what all other email programs offer.
Unfortunately, there are still some very noticeable pitfalls to Mailsmith. First of all, it has no HTML viewing capabilities, which will be annoying if you rely on email that has HTML formatting. It also has no real-time spell-checking, that seems to be becoming the norm in today's email clients. We also experienced some buggy behavior from our copy of the software. The program wouldn't let us send a message, no matter what we tried. Perhaps we missed something, but the setup should not be so strange that we can't send a message after an hour or two of fiddling. We also noticed that the word wrapping seemed to be broken -- new messages would not wrap properly, despite selecting the proper setting, when creating a new message. Again, this could be a fluke, but we don't like to see such flukes even on an occasional basis.
The final analysis: 2.5/5 stars.
Eudora 5.1 X
Eudora is clearly the old standby for Mac email clients. Despite some serious problems with earlier beta versions of Eudora 5.1 X, it appears that this latest beta is very solid and very fast. Eudora's handling of messages was second only to Mailsmith, but still very, very fast.
Eudora has never been wanting for features. This latest version includes virtually every feature of prior versions, and then some. Included in this list are realtime spell check and HTML rendering, both of which work well. Eudora is also highly customizable. It's settings options seem to go on for days, and it rarely the case that there's something you want to change and can't.
One of the more useful features of Eudora is that it has a built-in templating system where you can create template emails with whatever addresses or information you want. I use these to create messages that I frequently send, and then just fill in the address when I need to send one. Big timesaver!
Eudora also has some shortcoming, unfortunately. It still exhibits some bugs that will probably be fixed by the final version. For example, there are some bugs in the double clicking of URLs to open them in your browser of choice (the browser opens, but you don't visit the appropriate site). With any luck, though, these bug fixes should be made in due time. It stays a lot that Eudora in beta stage is a helluva lot better than most other email clients in final release versions. Best of all, Eudora is free if you can put up with small banner ad in the corner of your screen.
The final analysis: 4/5 stars.
Powermail
The bug surprise was Powermail. For those of you who are refuges from the long-unsupported and non-updated Claris Emailer, you will definitely want to give Powermail a go -- it's interface is a dead ringer for Claris Emailer v. 2.x, and it's similarly a pleasure to use.
Powermail stands apart from its competition with its extensive and easy to use import options -- it can easily handle the Entourage .mbox format if you are converting over from that program. Powermail's clean, uncluttered interface (see above screen capture) is truly a pleasure to work with. Also on the plus side is Powermail's price: a paltry $49 is a great buy for this excellent client.
On the downside, Powermail has slightly slower message scrolling/opening than Mailsmith or Eudora. It also has limited preferences, which seems to contribute to its ease of use, but detracts from power users used to having more control. There is also no built-in spell-check feature for the program, so if you're a bad typer or a bad speller, you might want to wait until this feature is included in future versions.
The final analysis: 3.5/5 stars.
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