Not that anyone else will care, but Monday I did something I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n
I just switched from BareBones\u2019s Mailsmith<\/a> to Apple\u2019s Mail (I\u2019ll go into the reasons for this later). Making a change like this will always include transitional pain. What surprises me is that I can\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n Stuff I already like better about Mail:<\/strong> Stuff I already miss:<\/strong> I hate rich text\/HTML email and thought I would miss Mailsmith\u2019s auto conversion into plain text, but Mail actually handles this pretty well.<\/p>\n The other thing that surprises me is that I can\u2019t find any sites devoted to making this transition. Surely I can\u2019t be the only one who has dumped Mailsmith for Mail? I know at least John Gruber <\/a>did it\u2014anyone else?<\/p>\n Postscript<\/strong> Not that anyone else will care, but Monday I did something I\u2019ve 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 … Continue reading Farewell, Old Friend<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/byrneweb.com\/sunburn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/byrneweb.com\/sunburn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/byrneweb.com\/sunburn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/byrneweb.com\/sunburn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/byrneweb.com\/sunburn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/byrneweb.com\/sunburn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/byrneweb.com\/sunburn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/byrneweb.com\/sunburn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/byrneweb.com\/sunburn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n\u2022 I\u2019m running Leopard, and Mail can use QuickLook on attachments. I like QuickLook in the Finder, and I didn\u2019t 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.
\n\u2022 IMAP support. Someday in the not too distant future, I\u2019ll be getting an iPhone, and that means I\u2019ll really need IMAP.
\n\u2022\u00a0Speed. 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.
\n\u2022 Better integration with other apps. For example, I use OmniFocus<\/a>, and it plays very well with Mail. And SpamSieve<\/a> 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.)
\n\u2022\u00a0Dynamic spell checking. <\/p>\n
\n\u2022 Mailsmith\u2019s text editing environment. Obviously, the Mailsmith editor is based on BBEdit, which means it rocks. What I miss most of all is the \u201cRewrap\u201d command, which re-wraps the selected bit of text and maintains the quote level. Years ago\u2014before Mailsmith existed\u2014I 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:
\n\u2022 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\u2019t 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\u2014hey, Mail team, what gives? How could you not want this property?
\n\u2022 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.<\/p>\n
\nWhy the change? I\u2019ve 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\u2019ve always really liked the way the BareBones folks have conceptualized the task of dealing with email. But in the last year or so, I\u2019ve developed more of a love\/hate relationship with it. It hasn\u2019t been updated in years (May 2005) and isn\u2019t Intel-native. It\u2019s dog slow, and the lack of updates means that it\u2019s fallen behind the technology curve pretty badly. I didn\u2019t 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<\/strong> able to successfully migrate to it, and of course it has stability issues, and I hate losing email. Also, there\u2019s the IMAP thing. But it\u2019s definitely weird to make the switch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"