Posts Tagged ‘POP’

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Mailsmith: New Intel-friendly public beta

Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007

MailsmithBare 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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Posted in Email in general, Not Apple Mail | 2 Comments »

A faster way to speed up Mail.app

Thursday, March 1st, 2007

SpeedymailUPDATE: A number of posters in the comments have pointed out that it is possible to run this command on just one line in the Terminal and to leave some of it out. See the comments if you are interested in more fancy ways to get the job done.

As everyone knows, it is possible to get quite a speed boost out of Mail.app by stripping all the bloat out of its Envelope index, an SQLite database Mail uses to store senders, recipients, subjects and so on.

In a past Hawk Wings tip , I suggested that quitting Mail, deleting the Envelope file and restarting Mail would force a rebuild that produces a leaner, faster email experience.

In October last year Dallas noticed a faster way to get the same result and posted it in the comments to that tip.

And there it remained until I noticed that Shaun Inman (an iCelebrity and developer of Mint which counts the peeps on Hawk Wings) had noticed it.

Here it is.

1. Quit Mail.

2. Open Terminal.

3. Type the following:

cd ~/Library/Mail
sqlite3 Envelope\ Index

An sqlite> prompt will appear.

At that prompt, type vacuum subjects;.

After a short delay, the prompt will return. Type Control-D to exit.

4. Restart Mail and enjoy the extra speed.

The first time he tried this, Rob Griffiths of macOSXHints reduced his Envelope index from 25.9MB to 4.5MB. My result was less dramatic (21.6MB -> 17.6MB) but Mail.app still felt a lot more zippy.

Some anecdotal evidence suggests that POP users don’t see the same reductions. Can any POP user out there confirm this?

UPDATE: It is easy to automate this using iCal and an applescript. See “Automating the Envelope speed trick“.

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Posted in Apple Mail, Productivity | 253 Comments »

Keeping Mail.app, Gmail and mobile phone mail in sync

Tuesday, December 5th, 2006

SamsungblackjackBrad Garland has a problem. He wants to keep the email in a Desktop email client (Apple Mail), a web-based service (Gmail) and on his mobile phone (Samsung Blackjack) in sync.

For me that’s not too hard. With Mail.app, an IMAP-based email service and a Nokia E60, it all syncs very nicely. If I wanted to, I could pipe my Gmail account through Fastmail as well, following Mike Davidson’s excellent walk-through.

Brad has set himself a harder target. He doesn’t like to use Google Mobile because it’s a pain to access.

And he likes to make the web-based interface his primary client, so he is connecting his Blackjack to Gmail via POP. It’s not much fun:

I am unable to delete any message from my phone and have it know to sync back up to Mail. When I send/receive again it just brings the message right back. So no deleting is possible from my mobile. But marking things as read/unread are… that’s strange to me. Why can it do one and not the other?

Finding a way to sync these three things can only get more important as more people look for more ways to access more of their email in more places.

Dan Warne finds a way to keep Mail.app, Gmail and his mobile email in sync with a Blackberry.

As he explains in an email:

The Blackberry can check up to 10 different mail accounts (including Gmail thanks to its POP access). But actually, I just forward all my email from all my different accounts into my Gmail account and have the Blackberry download from there.

The clever part is the autoconfiguration — you just put in your email address, username and password, and RIM’s database of mailservers works out the rest. As a result, all email sent FROM your blackberry is sent via Gmail’s SMTP and stored in the ’sent’ folder at Gmail. You can also choose to cc: all sent emails to an address of your choice.

And because Blackberry’s access to Gmail is “non-destructive” he gets a full POP download of all his messages in Mail.app. A neat but expensive solution.

Short of something unexpected like, say, Gmail offering IMAP connectivity or Blackberry giving him a free phone, I wonder what the solution for someone in Brad’s position is. It seems harsh just to say, learn to live with the pain of Google Mobile.

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Posted in Apple Mail, Productivity | 17 Comments »

Yahoo! pulls the plug on POP3 access?

Tuesday, October 24th, 2006

YahooAccording to a report on MacNN, Yahoo! has withdrawn POP3 access for external mail clients like Mail.app. Yahoo! webmail users will now only be able to use the service’s webmail interface.

The news item points to a Yahoo! Mail support statement that reads:

As a web-based email service, Yahoo! Mail does not currently offer access to POP or SMTP servers. This means that you will not be able to use an external email client such as Netscape Mail, Eudora, or Outlook to access your Yahoo! Mail account.

This seems to be a odds with other information (still?) on the Yahoo! Mail support site about POP3 access for Yahoo! Mail Plus accounts, and with my recollection that POP access has always been denied to users with free accounts.

Can anyone shed any more light on this?

UPDATE: Hmmm…. This may be a false alarm. Light shed in the comments suggests that no major change to existing restrictions has occurred. [Thanks, Ivan et al.]

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Posted in Apple Mail, Email in general | 12 Comments »

Big Wraps for IMAP (and tuffmail)

Monday, October 23rd, 2006

ImapmailboxesNot long ago Mail.app guru Joe Kissell was talking up the virtues of IMAP for email.

Now PC World has a post on the advantages of IMAP over POP as the protocol that should be handling your email.

It points out the gains of having email stored on a remote server, especially if you move around or need to access the same email at home and at work (or anywhere else). Storing your email remotely also allows you the freedom to use different email clients—Thunderbird on a PC at work, Mail.app on the Mac at home or whatever.

Needless to say it is also nice to have the security of remote storage. Whatever happens to my MacBook Pro or its harddrive, I know my mail is safe.

For example, deleting the settings for a POP account in Mail can delete all the messages stored in that account’s local folders. When they are gone, they are really gone. With IMAP, I know that can never happen. I just download them again into Mail.app’s local cache. That’s saved my bacon a few times.

Of course, you need to have the IMAP option in order to use it. Many ISPs still don’t offer it. I have been a long-time and very happy Fastmail user.

Geir at codehaus has just jumped from POP to IMAP. He gives tuffmail (another specialised email service provider) a glowing review.

A quick glance at the features tuffmail offers (cf. Fastmail’s features ), suggests that it is more flexible and more expensive than Fastmail.

You can build your own package with the mailboxes, storage and features that you need. It offers Roundcube as an interface for its webmail service. On the other hand, you don’t get the WebDAV disk that an enhanced Fastmail account offers.

No doubt there are other providers with IMAP offerings just as rich and useful. It’s the best USD 40 that I spend each year.

In return I get an utterly dependable, first-class IMAP service. If only all the things to which I am addicted were that cheap!

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Posted in Email in general | 8 Comments »

Switching a .Mac account from POP to IMAP

Thursday, October 5th, 2006

dotmac.Mac users who have their email set up as a POP account but would like to change it to the newer (and better) IMAP format, can find help in a thread on the Apple Discussion Boards.

A user in that situation asked for guidance and received two useful replies which set out different methods for making the switch.

Allan Sampson’s procedure (the second reply) seems simplest.

Following the steps set out there will make sure no emails are lost or accidently deleted by Mail.app’s unpleasant POP account ambush.

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Posted in Apple, Apple Mail | 2 Comments »

New PowerMail beta: Fully Universal, faster

Monday, September 18th, 2006

PowermailCTM Development has released a new beta of its email client PowerMail.

The new beta (5.5b2) is now a fully native universal application, a development which the company says underscores its “commitment to PowerMail’s future”.

It is now twice as fast thanks to code rewrites for its new universal status and upgrades to the database format.

The developers also say that Intel Mac users will notice much improved stability.

I took a look at PowerMail, which advertises itself as “A better Mac OS X mail client than Apple’s own”, at the end of last year.

I was unimpressed then with its IMAP support, lack of native spam filtering, its lack of extensibility and its cost (USD 82 = 65 euros including a bundled copy of SpamSieve).

Still, people with POP accounts who like more complicated searching than Mail.app can provide, extensive AppleScript support and a mail client with a built-in text snippet manager might like to try it out.

You can download a demo of the new universal beta from the app’s web site .

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Posted in Email in general | 2 Comments »

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