DrunkenBlog

Barebones' MailSmith

I got asked by a few people to post my views on MailSmith... checking their site, they're up to version 2.1 now. Below is part of an email exchange from August 11, 2003 where a guy was getting on me hardcore to check out MailSmith 2.0, as while the original OSX port was... problematic, he swore this one had reaffirmed his faith.

If you're not aware, MailSmith is a $99 email client for OSX whose two main claims to fame are BBEdit-style text editing capabilities, a mucho-granda database engine for fast searches and the like... and, um, text-only email. I swear to god, it's listed as a feature. I personally don't use anything but text-only email, but it's kind of like Apple listing grayscale as a supported video mode on their new powerbooks.

Oh, and for a limited time it includes a $25 copy of SpamSieve for your spam-fighting needs. I like SpamSieve muchly, but um, no getting away from the fact that MailSmith is pricey for what it does. Especially when that bundling is done and you are buying SpamSieve on your own.

Since I was on a clean install, I gave it a shot and compared it to another email program, GyazMail, since he had kindly checked out a piece of software I had been evangelizing. Again, this wasn't meant to be comprehensive, and it doesn't take 2.1 into account. If some things have been worked out, by all means let me know.

To: Charlie G ***n@zeta.org.au
Subject: Re: BareBones stands for Quality Assurance
Date: August 11, 2003

> I use re-wrapping all the time. And of course
> being a Bare Bones product means the re-wrapping
> (including quoted text) works really well.

Ah, yes that works well. I also wish it had entourage-style contextual menu option, IE, i select my text, right-click and tell it to rewrap and it does so. If I need to do something a little more complex, then I can go to the menu. It's that sort of thing that makes me shake my head a bit at mailsmith.

Of course Gyazmail doesn't offer it at all, so I keep a little app up and cut and paste between them. I've gone through Mailsmith 2.0 fairly heavily, and unfortunately it's a no-go. To test, I basically have backup .mbox's of my mail, and imported 90% of them into mailsmith, setup a few test accounts that left the mail on the server and used it for a day.

Most of the things are personal preference, but are basically:

1. Resource Usage
   Startup times are insane. Again, the startup times are insane. Whenever I open it, it constantly scans through all the folders (at least i think that's what its doing) in the left bar... this isn't even everything, about half of my large folders (~3,00 messages, all of them is about 7,000), and its a full minute until its done working, every startup. Whenever I expand a folder list it starts doing the same damn thing. It's been doing it to 3 folders continuously since i started it up for some reason, and the folders all have less than 10 messages in them, using 25% of the CPU while its in the background.

   While getting mail, it uses about 50% more CPU than gyazmail. For memory usage... right now, with one mail browser up, its using 47megabytes of RAM. Gyazmail has two browser up, and three emails I'm composing (including this one) and is using 35. Wonky.

2. Interface Bloat
   I don't mind the mail browser interface so much- not a big deal. But the mail composing window just pisses me off, seriously. It's interface is just terrible, especially while using something like a powerbook. It doesn't remember how I've sized the window, and it wastes sooo much space at the top that it just pisses me off. Sure, you can flip the arrow and hide it, but then you can't edit anything. It's just really poor UI. With bbedit it's the opposite, you get the feeling that there is no wasted space, and the interface has been honed over years and years to the tasks at hand. With mailsmith i get the impression that they're groping and not sure of what they're doing.

   I also got pretty annoyed trying to arrange folders "out of order" as i'd like them to be organized, as it seems to handle it the same as apple's mail. Grr. ;)

   One thing I do like is that fact that you can attach "notes" to the message, but again they seem to have missed the boat- I'd have been actually impressed if you could, for example, create events/reminders from those emails, even if just integrated into iCal or something.

   It seems to work a lot better for me if i go to a eudora-style mailbox list view and have multiple views open.

   No subject threading pretty much sucks- I'd have to think lots of programmers would want to use mailsmith as they already use bbedit, and hence are on developer lists. It really, really should be in there.

3. General Performance
   I'm on a fair amount of "large" mailing lists, such as some linux groups, cocoa-programmer lists, php lists, etc. Some of these generate hundreds of messages a day, and I'm always going through them.

   I did some general testing, counting out seconds. So they're not very accurate, but give a gist.

   View folder with 1,200 messages:
   

   • GyazMail: 1 second
     
   • MailSmith: 2 seconds

   Scroll folder with 1,200 messages:*
   

   • GyazMail: 6 seconds
     
   • MailSmith: 4 seconds

   I think Mailsmith's use of carbon views instead of cocoa is really helping it out in the scrolling department... scrolling tableviews in cocoa is just notoriously slow.

   Delete 400 message in folder of 1,200 messages:*
   

   • GyazMail: 4 second
     
   • MailSmith: 12 seconds

   * This could probably be a lot faster in gyazmail, as the app insists on updating the read/undread icon for every message it deletes into a void icon first, instead of turning them all into a delete icon and then removing them from the screen. Geh, I've emailed the author several times about it... but he doesn't reply to emails so oh well.

   I could have done more, but that pretty much told me what I wanted to know. As I mentioned before, mailsmith has a habit of continuously sucking down CPU time for some reason. I've quit it and relaunched it and its still using up 15% CPU time!

   Some of these things are just frightening to me... GyazMail should be coming in dead last in a lot of these things from an architectural standpoint... mail is stored in individual text files and an index file is created from them... but nothing really database like, as you can tell when you try to scroll a list of messages and its hitting the disk.

4. Installation
   They've made it a little easier in 2.0, you just drag it to the disk... but then it starts searching every single drive for stuff when you start it up. Took 10 minutes, as I have 7 external hard drive. Nutso. Reminds me too much of "vise" installers, the newest flash update took 30 minutes. Gah.

   In contrast, I just installed the new 1.1 of gyazmail in less than a minute, and that includes mounting the .dmg. :)

5. Stability
   I've had gyazmail running for up to 10 days at a time, doing its thing- and have been using it heavily for about a month and a half. It's never crashed. Ever. Mailsmith 2.0 has already crashed on me twice, once while importing and another while opening a message.

6. Fear + proprietary formats
   This ties into (v), in that mailsmith and a few others store their stuff in a proprietary database. Sure you can export as .mbox, but for a pretty complex setup that is very prohibitive. And you never know when some sort of corruption occurs due to a crash, or something more general. I got hit by this hard with entourage. In contrast, something like gyaz stores each and every message in its own file, which you can open up in a text editor if you wanted (lol, yes i tested it). Others just store it within an .mbox. While there are some downsides, the upsides are very appealing.
   

If I absolutely trusted mailsmith, it might be a different story as far as some of these things are concerned. But since I don't, I'll just have to stick with what I have and rewrap on my own till the author implements it. :(

 Posted by drunkenbatman
    May 30, 2004, at 01:24 PM