“Mailsmith 2.2 Mostly-Semi-Sorta (OK Totally) Public Beta”

At long last — and folks, I *do mean* LOOOONG last — Mailsmith 2.2 has been released to (semi-)public beta.

Like John Gruber and Michael Tsai, I've been using pre-release versions of Mailsmith for years (nay, centuries!), so most of these features are not new to me. But still, I'm very happy with this release. It's good, and a very welcome improvement over the previous public release (which was already my least-disliked email client).

(That may sound like a backhanded compliment. It's not intended to be. My old thoughts on email clients still ring true today.)

The change list in this 2.2 beta is commensurate with the amount of time Mailsmith's users waited for it. Some of my favorites:

• Excellent Unicode support. Their new and improved support was what inspired me, last year, to treat all messages in Conversant as UTF-8.

• Zip compression. StuffIt no longer required.

• Inline spell checking.

• The new Simple Query window is wonderful (though this is an area that's clearly still in beta)

• Replies can be automatically moved to the same mailbox as the original. Love it!

• "Send PDF with Mailsmith" — handy workflow feature

• The new soft wrapping options and format=flowed feature are conceptually related, and are a couple of my favorite new features.

• The whole Menus preferences system (mainly because I like to hide what I know I don't need)

• The clippings changes, because they stem from work I helped with (a little) in BBEdit and I have an ego ;-)

• Growl support

• Don't Bug Me! My number one favorite new feature is the "Do Not Disturb" feature. See the "Mailsmith" menu, or the dock icon's contextual menu. (I called it the "Don't Bug Me" feature when I requested it. I saw another beta tester refer to it as, "the greatest feature he never knew he needed.")

• Spotlight support.

• All the new toolbar icons.

• The text version of HTML messages is much nicer. It might look surprisingly similar to some people around here... ;-)

The list is so long that I'm reminded that anybody new to Mailsmith 2.2 probably won't know where to start. So I suggest that you set the following (new/changed) preferences if they're not already:

• Under "Sending," set "Move it to Original's Mailbox"

• Under "Editing: General," set "Soft Wrapped Line Indentation" to "First Line"

• Under "Mail Lists," set "Show Buttons in Lists"

• Under "Menus," turn off the "Tools" menu if it isn't already.

• Make sure you at least notice the options at the bottom of the "Menus" preference pane, where you can control which items appear in the contextual menu.

• The simple query window won't default to the currently selected mailbox(es) unless you run this command in Terminal:
  defaults write com.barebones.mailsmith Misc:AlwaysUseSelectedMailboxesForQuery -bool YES

  Update: I see Michael agrees with me.

  The issue here is that users have two conflicting "needs" with the Query windows. I almost always want the Simple Query window to open with the current mailbox pre-selected. However, there are a few occasions (and it's probably more common for other types of users) where I have carefully chosen a subset of my 63 mailboxes (folders) and run a search, then realized that I left out a search term. With the above preference set the way I have it now, reopening the Simple Query window reverts the mailbox selection to the "current mailbox", so I need to reselect the subset of mailboxes to search.

  I'm not the fan of "prefs for everything" that I once was, and I totally understand the need to keep the UI clean and simple.

  My thought for this particular problem would be a way to move back and forth through a history of selected mailbox sets. When a query is run, another set is added to the history unless it's identical to the most recent set.

  Just thinking out loud, I guess.

If you're a Mailsmith user (past or present), give this new version a spin. The link for downloading is at the bottom of the change list.