CTM 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 . email in general, powermail, email, mail.app, apple mail, POP, IMAP, searching, universal binary

Ken Ferry’s Mail Type Select plugin for Mail.app adds “Finder-like” text matching to the message list window.

That is to say, when the plugin is installed, you can click in the message list window and start typing. Mail will match on the first occurrence of what you type just as finder does (you can jump to additional matches using the Control+down arrow or up arrow keys). It’s quick. After you have used it for a while, it could become second nature. Nice.

It’s now a universal binary, so Intel Mac users can benefit from the speedy matching too.

Mail Type Select is freeware. It’s available from Ken Ferry’s web site .apple mail, mail.app, plugins, text matching, productivity, searching, Finder

Maciej Ceglowski decided to use Mail.app to archive the early letters of Alexander Pushkin , in part inspired by the Samuel Pepys Blog and in part because email clients offer built-in search and sort features.

It went quite well, but didn’t completely satisfy:

I had to bump the date up by 200 years because Mail.app refuses to properly sort nineteenth century email. I consider this a bug.

He plans to set up an IMAP server to store this kind of information as emails. And he is looking for good sources of material.mail.app, apple mail, pushkin, literature, archiving, searching, sorting

Described by the developers as “iPhoto for PDFs”, kip offers tagging, sorting, searching and syncing with iDisk for your PDFs. Its scanning features also promise a way to centralise and organise all those bills, receipts, reports, and other bits of paper laying around the house.

Screenshots and more on kip’s features after the jump.

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This post will appeal to Mail users who keep an eye on the wider picture or who live partly in a Windows world.

As Microsoft revs itself up to deliver Windows Vista sometime next year, it is working on the next generation of email clients for the new OS, Windows Mail and Windows Live Mail Desktop.

Bryan Starbuck , the development lead for Windows email clients, has posted a feature list of the two apps:

Windows Mail, which Hawk Wings has already covered , is the new name for Outlook Express. It is the default client in Windows Vista, Apple Mail’s most direct “competitor”.

You can read more about it on Microsoft’s Vista preview site or watch a 46 min video demo.

Windows Live Mail Desktop is a more ambiguous project. It aims to broaden the scope of “the email experience” by integrating RSS feeds and web searches into its interface.

The RSS feed feature sounds clever. It will allow you to forward or email your thoughts about a particular blog post to the author as you read it. Search-as-you-type promises to locate information quickly.

Active Search will be great, Bryan says :

Active Search bridges the gap between your inbox and the broader web using the power of search. Using Active Search is essentially the same as conducting a ton of related searches the old fashioned way – by cutting and pasting terms from your email into a separate web browser – only without all the effort.

Screenshots of the next Outlook beta speak for themselves .outlook, windows, vista, email, windows mail, windows live mail desktop, RSS feeds, searching

MailSteward is an app that archives your Apple Mail messages in a relational database so that they can be searched with more options and power than Spotlight can manage on its own.

An updated version released today upgrades the database engine to SQLite 3.3.5.

You can also set and/or buttons for searching more easily, delete attachments and set a default font.

It has also resolved a small problem in importing MailTags.

MailSteward is fifteen US dollars more expensive than Mail Archiver X, but about half the price of FastMailBase.

Which one is the best? Mail Archiver X offers cleaning, MailSteward offers more sophisticated searching as you can see below:

MailSteward is shareware (USD 49.95) and is available from the developer’s web site .apple mail, mail.app, archiving, searching, mailtags, plugins

Mindless Fluffiness doesn’t like Mail.app much.

In fact, he thinks it’s so bad that he cannot fathom “why people go on about Apple’s great software”.

He has a list of eight grievances, which I’m going to reproduce in full:

1. They broke the ability to bind a key sequence to applescript in latest version
2. Earlier versions failed to check the certificate name of server in SSL connections
3. Can’t filter to display only unread messages
4. Does not spell check the Subject line when spell checking rest of message
5. Can’t include folder name in filter rule criteria
6. Search does not seem to use Spotlight
7. You can choose to check spelling when you send, or to have red squiggles under misspelled words – however you can’t have both. This is “upgrade” from pervious version where you could not spell check on send at all.
8. If you have two email address for a person, no way to set the preferred one.

No one respects the right of people to have an opinion, to use NotifX, to say Mail sucks or whatever more than I do.

Still, I can’t help mentioning:

1. Quicksilver triggers or FastScripts offer excellent workarounds for this.

3. A Smart Mailbox with the condition “Message is Unread” achieves this nicely.

6. Mail uses its own database for searches involving To, From, and Subject lines. For everything else it uses Spotlight. Scott Morrison , the developer of Mail Act-on and MailTags, has written a nice, simple explanation of searches in Mail.

8. Address Book allows you to set a default email address for people with more than one.

That still leaves four.

But a happy relationship with an email client is like the love of a good woman. It’s the art of compromise.mail.app, apple mail, searching, smart mailboxes, address book, unhappy users