Mailsmith

Freeware

Current Version: 2.2.5 (January 6, 2010)

From Rich Siegel, primary author of the fabulous BBEdit text editor, comes the Mailsmith email client, which offers very sophisticated email filtering (including integrated support for SpamSieve and PGP), a clean user interface, and a BBEdit-like editing capability that few other email programs can match.

Version 2.2 made a positively huge number of enhancements that belies a bump in version number from 2.1 to 2.2, but the main shift was from a commercial to a freeware application. Bare Bones software's Rich Siegel noted:

"As this release, Mailsmith is no longer a product of Bare Bones Software. It's now being maintained, developed, and supported under the auspices of Stickshift Software, LLC, a company which was formed the the specific purpose of giving Mailsmith a home. My ongoing goal is to support and enhance Mailsmith on an ad-hoc basis as has been done over most of the 2.2 beta cycle: this means occasional (if not exactly regular :-)) releases to fix bugs and add features. (My work at Bare Bones Software remains my first and highest priority.) The other big change is that Mailsmith is now freeware. The price tag has been removed, and it is available for use at no charge. The end-user license agreement has been modified to reflect this, and is likewise available for review on the web site."

Version 2.2.5 makes the following additional changes:

• Addressed overuse of fcntl(F_FULL_SYNC) which caused database performance problems.
• Fixed display glitch which would occur when making the message view visible via the splitter, after having opened the Mail Browser window with the message view hidden. (This also affects other windows which contain a message view and other lists, such as per-mailbox windows and query results.)
• Fixed crash in the Spotlight metadata importer on some gratuitously malformed messages.

Mailsmith requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later; Mac OS X 10.5 or later is strongly recommended.