Bare Bones has announced a new public beta of Mailsmith, its (once upon a time) landmark email client.

Mailsmith 2.2 (beta) is a universal build, so it runs with all the grunt that an Intel Mac can provide.

It also changes the way in which email data is stored. Once you start using it, you can’t go back to Mailsmith 2.1.5.

The new version features an updated user interface:

Mailsmith picks up numerous changes to the UI, built-in text editing, and transformation abilities, all derived from BBEdit 8/TextWrangler 2. They are too numerous to list here, but generally fall into the realm of Unicode support, improved Mac OS X appearance and behavior, and various performance and behavior refinements.

Other updates include more options for handling compressed archives, the ability to import gzipped mbox files, a new “flag” option for messages, a new top-level menu for Bare Bones “Clippings” feature, improved display of emails composed with the “format=flowed” option (hurrah!) and more.

The full list of improvements is provided in an email from Bare Bones CEO Rich Siegal on the Mailsmith mailing list along with this warning:

Mailsmith 2.2 is not ready for release to the general public. It is pre-release software, which has not been completely tested or debugged. We will do our best to fix any bugs that are reported; but you must acknowledge, at least to yourself, that you are assuming a certain amount of risk by using this pre-release version; and that by assuming that risk, you accept all responsibility for the consequences of doing so.

If you dare, you can download a copy of the new beta from Bare Bones web site.

Mailsmith doesn’t support new-fangled things like IMAP or Exchange accounts.

[Via TUAW ]

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Apple has published a tip on re-sizing photos in Mail “on the fly” which was picked up by TUAW (and others).

It points out that if you drag a full-sized photo into a new message window, you can then resize it using the drop-down menu in the bottom righthand corner to Large (1280×800 pixels), Medium (640×400) or Small (320×200) sizes:

Now, obviously, any Mail tip is a good one by definition and any resizing is better than none for your Sent Mail folder, your bandwidth and your recipient, but there is one thing that the tip doesn’t mention.

Mail sucks at resizing images.

A year ago, Rob Griffiths ran the tests and did the sums when the same tip was posted on macOSXHints. He discovered that Photoshop is between 61% and 73% more efficient at the same tasks. Even iPhoto itself does a better job.

Not everyone owns or likes sledge hammer apps like Photoshop, but if you do this a lot, you could consider utilities like Downsize or Scale to Mail, which will resize your images efficiently without the need to fire up the monster.

If you are reading this but for some perverse reason don’t use Mail, resized photos may still be within your grasp. If you use Claris Emailer, GyazMail, Mailsmith, Outlook Express, PowerMail or QuickMail Pro, Simon Jacquier’s iPhoto Mailer Patcher lets you hack iPhoto to set your email client as the recipient of resized photos.

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Jim Correia of Bare Bones has written an applescript that will send a selected Yojimbo item to someone via Mail.app. (He has also written one for Mailsmith ).

Of course, you can do more of less the same thing by dragging the item onto the Mail.app Dock icon. However, this script can be attached to a Quicksilver trigger (Let Merlin Mann show you how ) or keyboard shortcut (using FastScripts or similar). This seems quicker and more appealing to me.

To use it, get the text from the Yojimbo mailing list archive.

Load it into Script Editor, compile it to make sure everything is good and then save it in the Yojimbo folder in your ~/Library/Scripts/Applications folder.

Or create a Yojimbo folder there if one doesn’t exist. That way the script will always be at the top of the AppleScript menu when Yojimbo is the active app.

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SidewinderX is an automated spam and phishing scam reporting tool.

At the click of an applescript it will process your Junk mailbox, determine the sending domain of all the junk mails inside it and report them to the abuse contact of that domain.

A new version (1.0.5), released a few days ago, includes scripts to automate the reporting for Mail.app, Entourage, Mailsmith, Eudora, and Powermail.

You can see a helpful screencast of how it works on the developer’s web site .

No doubt it’s clever; the real question is, is it smart?

Debate continues. Despite some miracle stories on the results of bouncing spam emails, there are some reasons why bouncing (or automated spam reporting) may not be a good idea.

You can read them in previous Hawk Wings post on “To bounce or not to bounce?” here and here.

Apple’s own technote on tries to distinguish between spam worth bouncing (or reporting) and spam that is not.

SidewinderX is sharware (USD 19.95) and is available from the developer’s web site .

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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”.

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Simon Jacquier’s iPhoto Mailer Patcher is been updated so that it will work with any version of iPhoto 4.0 to 6.0.4.

By default, iPhoto’s “Send photos by email” feature only supports AOL, Eudora, Mail.app and Microsoft’s Entourage. iPhoto Mailer Patcher adds support for Claris Emailer, GyazMail, Mailsmith, Outlook Express, PowerMail and QuickMail Pro. Only Thunderbird misses out, due to its “unscriptability”.

Getting Simon’s hack to work with iPhoto 5 or 6 used to involve manually editing the ClientAppSignatures.plist file in iPhoto’s package. It was messy. Now it is all automated by the Patcher’s installer.

iPhoto Mailer Patcher is donation-ware and is available from Simon’s web site .

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