Bare Bones Software, Inc., has released Mailsmith 1.5.

Look, the truth is that email clients suck. All of them, they all suck. Some less than others, of course. So it's ironic that my absolute favorite email client is from a company whose motto is "Software that doesn't suck."

I'm one of the (rather proud) beta testers for Mailsmith.

The list of improvements from the previous version (1.1.6) to this new version is extremely long. My favorites include the following:

• The same text engine as is used in BBEdit 6.5, including GREP-based searching across one or many mailboxes
• Nearly identical text-suite support (scripting) as in BBEdit 6.5
• Built-in PGP support (not available on X because PGP isn't on X yet)
• One-click SpamCop reporting
• Display HTML email as plain text

In my opinion, Mailsmith sucks the least of all of the email clients I've used. I even like 1.5 better than the long-dead Claris Emailer... and that's really saying something.

(To anybody who tried Mailsmith when it was first released: it's lost all of the stability problems that plagued it back then. Mailsmith hasn't crashed on me, except when using a couple of the betas, in at least a year.)

Congratulations on a job well done to Rich, Jim, Christian, John, and everybody else at BareBones.