I was surprised to discover an email that I received a few days ago was written in Mailsmith, so someone is still using it. (In fact, he is a member of the Mac blogging nobility, where Mailsmith retains strong appeal, so I shouldn’t have been so surprised).
If you are using Mailsmith and thinking about a move to Mail.app (or anywhere else), David Hamilton has written a script
that exports emails in a smarter way than the default that comes with Mailsmith itself.
He has tweaked it so that it will preserve your folder hierarchy in Mailsmith which the default script flattens.
Of course, “no guarantees, representations, or warrantees by the author or anyone else”.
Mailsmith is a very nice and powerful application – the only problem I had, was the horrible performance.
It is so damn slow that it was impossible for me to use it anymore – I had about 100k messages and mailboxes with more than 5k messages are virtually impossible in Mailsmith on my Powerbook G4. No way of using it without always waiting for some actions to finish.
I converted first to Entourage and later to Mail.app but I always wait for a better Mailsmith release with more performance and perhaps re-written with a modern interface like Yojimbo.
Guido wrote:
An interesting idea. I wonder if that will happen.
“still using Mailsmith” … of course, simply because it’s the best client around (for me at least)
Just a note to say that the script works beautifully except it chokes on any mailbox name that contains an apostrophe.
I didn’t try to fix the script. I just let it run until it errored, then renamed the offending mailboxes.