“RE: BareBones (Finally) Releases Mailsmith 1.5”

I really wanted to switch to Mailsmith (I'm using the last Eudora OSX beta) because I'm a big fan of BBEdit. One of the thing that I never liked in Mailsmith is that it use a proprietary database instead of the mbox format, which is just a text file. I like this format because I can open a mailbox in BBEdit if I need to do complex search. Then I thought, what the heck, I can do these search in Mailsmith. So I downloaded the Mailsmith demo and imported my mailboxes from Eudora.

The search function is really one of the most important aspect for me for an email client, because I use it all the time. Well, I was extremely disappointed by the speed of Mailsmith, to the point that I was wondering if the Mailsmith db was corrupted.

This the time (in seconds) I get in searching for the word "jake" in Mailsmith, Eudora, and BBEdit in my Frontier-Server mailbox (+10,000 messages)

Mailsmith: Simple Query only in the body of the messages: 105 s/263 matches

Eudora:option-cmd-F (search in the body of the message): 7s/263 matches

BBEdit: Frontier-Server mailbox open in BBEdit and then do a "Search all": 6s/536 matches (BBEdit see the headers here, the advantage of BBEdit is the Result browser).

So BBEdit is the fastest, and the Result window is the nicest way to display the results.

I don't get why Mailsmith use a database instead of the mbox format. Anyway, I'm surprised that Mailsmith is so slow when searching. This is with OS X 10.1.3, 576 MB of RAM on a G4 400 AGP.

Cheers -Emmanuel

PS: I really want to switch to Mailsmith, but what I'm describing here is really a deal stopper for me.