Email for giants

Posted on June 20, 2003 by Ian Betteridge

Bare Bones is probably my favourite Mac software company. After all, it makes BBEdit, which is the lord of all text editors. Its mail client, Mailsmith, has always left me a little cold, though, probably because it always felt like BBEdit with a POP client tacked on the side.
The latest release, 2.0, is much, much improved. If you do any kind of serious email and want something that leaves Apple’s Mail in the dust, have a look at it. Although the interface is still a little spartan, it’s incredibly powerful – probably the closest the Mac comes to one of the powerful Unix text mail clients.
And no, it does not do HTML.

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  • http://www.twisty.com/ Tim Brayshaw

    …And no, it does not do HTML

    …nor IMAP. If it did IMAP, I’d definitely give it a go – the trial is a tempter. Until then I’ll make do with Mail.app and Mozilla mail.

  • Jude

    Actually, BBEdit is *not* the lord of all text editors. Homesite is. Admittedly, BBEdit *is* truly fucking excellent (with better regex support), but Homesite is better.

  • jim68000

    Hoorah! A text editor war and no-one’s mentioned vi yet.

    Jude, I think you may have missed the point. Homesite is probably a better HTML editor than BBEdit, but not a better text editor. BBEdit is a general purpose text editor suitable for everyuthing from C to shopping lists. It’s one of the few applications I miss from the Mac.

    Not that BBEdit is perfect: it’s not as extensible as Ultraedit or *cough* Emacs. If you want syntax support for a new language you have to wait for Barebones to get round to adding it. Meanwhile the live syntax checking for perl and HTML in ActiveState Komodo is lightyears ahead of any of the others (shame the rest of the editor’s a bit pants).

    That said, Text Editor wars are amusing but people’s reasoned opinions nearly always come down to “the editor I first learnt”.

    Bet Mailsmith is still shit though.