Not that anyone else will care, but Monday I did something I’ve been both dreading and looking forward to for a while: I changed email clients. Why is this a big deal? Well, I probably spend as much time in my email client as in any other application, so my mail client impacts my day like few other changes in my electronic world.
I just switched from BareBones’s Mailsmith to Apple’s Mail (I’ll go into the reasons for this later). Making a change like this will always include transitional pain. What surprises me is that I can’t find any site with stuff to ease the change. Keyboard shortcuts are all different, but those can be re-assigned pretty easily. But some of the other stuff is harder. In just two days, I already have some strong impressions.
Stuff I already like better about Mail:
• I’m running Leopard, and Mail can use QuickLook on attachments. I like QuickLook in the Finder, and I didn’t think of this before I saw it, but email is the ultimate place for it. It might have been worth it for this feature alone. Mail seems to handle attachments better in other ways as well.
• IMAP support. Someday in the not too distant future, I’ll be getting an iPhone, and that means I’ll really need IMAP.
• Speed. Mailsmith had become such a dog, especially on Intel hardware. I love being able to click a column header to sort by that and have a mailbox with thousands of messages sorted immediately, or mark 50 messages as read and not have to wait for the spinning beach ball for 20 seconds.
• Better integration with other apps. For example, I use OmniFocus, and it plays very well with Mail. And SpamSieve now seems to play as well with Mail as with Mailsmith. (Actually, better, since the spam mailbox can now be sorted by spam probability, which is great.)
• Dynamic spell checking.
Stuff I already miss:
• Mailsmith’s text editing environment. Obviously, the Mailsmith editor is based on BBEdit, which means it rocks. What I miss most of all is the “Rewrap” command, which re-wraps the selected bit of text and maintains the quote level. Years ago—before Mailsmith existed—I used Eudora, and had an Applescript which copied the current text, opened it in BBEdit, and then I used another script to bring it back to Eudora. I would just do that again, except for:
• Applescript support. Mail has some, but not nearly as much as Mailsmith, which is the king of scriptability. Some of the things that are gone don’t surprise me, but others boggle my mind. In particular, Mail does not provide Applescript access to the contents (the text) of an email message that is being composed, nor access to the message associated with a window. This is totally indefensible—hey, Mail team, what gives? How could you not want this property?
• Annotation. Mailsmith supports things like notes on emails and coloration under script control, which allows all kinds of tagging that is hard to do in Mail.
I hate rich text/HTML email and thought I would miss Mailsmith’s auto conversion into plain text, but Mail actually handles this pretty well.
The other thing that surprises me is that I can’t find any sites devoted to making this transition. Surely I can’t be the only one who has dumped Mailsmith for Mail? I know at least John Gruber did it—anyone else?
Postscript
Why the change? I’ve been using Mailsmith since before version 1.0 (I was a beta tester for it), which works out to something on the order of a decade. I’ve always really liked the way the BareBones folks have conceptualized the task of dealing with email. But in the last year or so, I’ve developed more of a love/hate relationship with it. It hasn’t been updated in years (May 2005) and isn’t Intel-native. It’s dog slow, and the lack of updates means that it’s fallen behind the technology curve pretty badly. I didn’t dump it last summer because last April BareBones started a public beta test, but the betas have been, well, betas. I tried several iterations, and I was never able to successfully migrate to it, and of course it has stability issues, and I hate losing email. Also, there’s the IMAP thing. But it’s definitely weird to make the switch.