OT Mailsmith [Was: Bare Bones [was: [TxMt] Public to-do list for TM]

[Mark Smith]

William D.Neumann wrote:


>Really?  when was the last time they added anything significant to 
>Mailsmith?  I'm not even sure there were any significant additions with 
>the 2.0 release...

Depends what you consider significant. There has been a steady stream of feature additions whilst admittedly some of the big wished for features have not appeared. I am frustrated by the lack of IMAP support and the lack of the ability to save the otherwise unparalleled searches.

>Have they even hinted that they might even be 
>considering thinking about looking at adding IMAP support yet?

Yes, it is officially acknowledged as a planned feature. As are saved queries. My guess (and it is a guess) is that a mahor rewrite of Mailsmith is underway and that the next big release (probably post Tiger) will contain both IMAP support *and* savable queries, possibly in a smart-mailbox analog.



>I don't 
>really know about the second one, as I stopped reading that mailing 
>list when it became obvious IMAP support wasn't coming anytime soon 
>(and that they weren't planning on dropping that horrible database they 
>use for their mailstore).

The mailstore aspect is interesting. I'd like to know of a better model. Mbox and maildir have their own issues and on their own don't offer anything like Mailsmith's "metadata" possibilities. Both also start to get troublesome with very large numbers of messages. With the advent of spotlight indexing, it *may* be conceivable for Bare Bones to change the message storage model for Mailsmith, we will see.


>Anyway, that's neither here nor there.  Suffice it to say that the Bare 
>Bones public interface model has left me with a very bad taste in my 
>mouth, and resulted in them losing me as a customer.  At the same time 
>I find Allan's style much more to my liking.  Now if he would just get 
>to work on making TextMate fix my code for me as I'm typing it in...

I also like Allan's approach and take my hat off to him for the effort he is putting in. No question. At the same time, I have been treated superbly as a Bare Bones customer. Several support issue have been handled impeccably. All of my mail to support in the areas of feature requests and suggestions have been handled politely and effectively and some have produced results.

It *is* true that on the lists, some Bare Bones staff can be sarcastic or impatient with certain types of post, and I can understand that e.g. Rich's style will rub some folks up the wrong way, but this doesn't seem to me like a reason to publicly whine about the company. They have a veritable army of very satisfied and loyal customers.

OK. Enough from me already. I'm going to focus on TextMate from now on and ignore the Bare Bones jibes.

I may be looking for help with a module for "ConTeXt per XeTeX" soon, hopefully my even-handed treatment of Bare Bones won't preclude me from getting any.

mark.