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”. mail.app, apple mail, mailsmith, exporting, applescript, folders, switching

Dave Hamilton from the Mac Observer is thinking about switching to Mail.app.

He has had a gutful of his old mail client:

Mailsmith, by most rights, has stagnated. It pains me to write this, because as I said, I’m a really big fan of BareBones, and enjoy a great working relationship with their head-honcho, Rich Siegel. But it’s true… Mailsmith hasn’t had a public release/update since March of 2005. Now some folks may argue that it doesn’t need an update, and for those folks, I’m sure that’s correct. My big problem is that I manage a LOT of e-mail… I have almost 1400 mailboxes within which are nearly 200,000 e-mail messages. I pretty much save everything, and it’s saved my ass in HUGE ways over the years, so I ain’t gonna stop.

So, he wonders, does Mail.app have what it takes to manage a large number of mailboxes and bucketloads of email? Or is he better off archiving off a large slab of the emails and staying with Mailsmith?

My advice is not much good. I only have about 35,000 emails spread over four IMAP accounts and about ten mailboxes (see further, “How the delete key is your best friend”). That’s chicken feed by Dave’s standards.

Justin Blanton once ran a challenge to find the largest Mail mailbox, putting up his own inbox of 22,000 as a candidate.

What’s your experience? What’s your biggest mailbox? How many mailboxes does your Mail.app handle without working up a sweat?

Can Mail.app take the load? Does size matter?mail.app, apple mail, mailboxes, email volume, biggest mailbox, switching, Mailsmith, email in general

François Joseph de Kermadec, who posts on the O’Reilly MacDevCenter site, got quite a fright from Mail.app today:

Today, Mail went postal (hmm, do I chalk up that one as a bad pun or coincidental wording?) on me. Deleting a message would make it reappear. Moving anything would duplicate it. Corruption crept everywhere, in subtle ways. Nothing was really reproducible but nothing was totally random either. In other words, hell.

As a result, he is giving up on Mail with a mixture of anxiety and hope.

The rest of his post is an interesting tour through the innards of Mail.app’s Mail folder, weighing the good and bad things about its organisation and arguing that the app’s development has brought about too much complexity:

To me, Mail’s facade is the best of all Mac OS X applications out there. The way it thinks about mails, the way organizes them. But looking into its Mail folder just shows how it has evolved and, more importantly, how dramatically it did, with no signs of slowing down. Too much in too little time, really. For example, should a crucial application like an email client rely on the first version of system-wide frameworks (I’m thinking Spotlight here)? Should an application take it upon itself to create an SSL-capable account automatically upon first startup without turning SSL on and without giving the user a chance to stop sending the password in the clear (.Mac indeed)?

He’s not sure what client to switch to. And there’s the rub. For all its quirks, it’s hard to beat Mail.app as the most satisfying email client out there. Not least, the control it gives to users through an abundance of plugins is unparalleled.

He’ll be back.mail.app, apple mail, plugins, mail folder, unhappy users, switching

Nick Gerakines has had a gutful of Mail.app.

“I’ve become sick and tired of Mail.app crashing and failing”, he writes.

So he is returning to an old favourite and he is liking what he sees after a few years away with other email clients:

I’ve used everything from Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Mail.app, Evolution, Thunderbird, Entourage and even Squirrelmail. None of them, however, compare to the simplicity and security that I have with mutt.

He outlines how he has set up mutt to run on his Mac, and how it co-operates with fetchmail, procmail and postfix to deliver just the email experience that he likes.

He promises to post more detailed howtos soon.mutt, procmail, fetchmail, postfix, mail.app, apple mail, even Squirrelmail, tips

Pedro Figueiredo has dumped Mail.app and switched to Entourage at work.

He finds the look of his new email client hard on the eyes (“ffs microsoft, did you employ a colour-blind guy to do that?”) and misses Mail’s search abilities. It’s “giving in to the Dark Side”, he says, only half in jest.

Bryce Zabel just switched to Macs after 20 years of PC use.

He started off using Entourage, because it was part of Office for Mac. But then he realised “that I was holding onto the old ways and if I was going Apple then, dammit, I was going in all the way. Now I use Mail, iCal and Address Book and, for me, I honestly do like them better.” He’s in heaven.switching, entourage, mail.app, apple mail, ical, Address Book, imac

MacOSXHints has a detailed walkthrough on switching from the Linux email client Ximian Evolution to Entourage via Apple Mail.

Of course, it is possible to stop half-way.

The tip includes instructions on moving both emails into Mail.app and contact information into Address Book.

SystemsAligned offers a number of scripts and utilities which convert qmail-style Maildir email folders into the standard UNIX mbox format that Mail.app can import (and vice-versa).

Don’t know what that means? Neither do I really, although Wikipedia points the way. (Gosh, that’s a resource worth supporting!)

But people who do know what this means and who need to do a conversion like this may find the SystemsAligned resources a useful supplement to the Kmail to mbox script.