I’m a long time user of the mail client Mailsmith and I’ve been very satisfied it. Sure it has it quirks and miss some minor features but all-in-all it’s the best email client for the Mac – at least for me. However, it has one big problem: it doesn’t do IMAP.
This wasn’t a problem for me until two years ago. My main computer has for a long time been a laptop that I’ve used both at work and at home – in other words I never needed to access my email using different computer and thus a POP3 client like Mailsmith has worked just fine for me. But two years ago I bought a iPod Touch and started to use the built-in mail client and my problems started. However, it worked pretty well since I couldn’t use the Touch client that much due to limited WiFi access.
But in august 2009 there was a change for the worse – I bought an iPhone and with almost unlimited 3G access I’m now reading/sending email from the iPhone on a daily basis. Which of course complicated my email handling since I now had two machines where I access my email. So I started to look for a good email client that supported IMAP – and failed miserable. There are several clients available, for example Mail, Thunderbird, Eudora, Postbox, but none of them work the way I like. So I’ve continued to use Mailsmith and GMail in a very hackish /confusing way that required some extra work for every single email … not good.
I’ve always thought I was one of the very few who wasn’t satisfied with the available clients and thought that this was how things were going to stay in the future. But last weekend something happened, Last week, actually six days ago, Brent Simmons wrote on his blog that he had set up a mailing list for discussing a “Pro” email client … I joined and suddenly Mailsmith started to download unusually large numbers of email every morning. It looks like I wasn’t alone in wanting to have a better email client !!! When I write this I have about 1900 (!!!! in six days) emails discussing features and how to implement this new email client.
I don’t know if it ever will be released but it’s encouraging to see names of the people involved, some of them are long-time Mac developers with a proven track record. It will be interesting to see what happens …