Mac Net Journal

The road that led to my move back to PowerMail after spending the last few months working with Eudora 6.x was a journey. First, I decided to try out Apple's Mail.app under Panther, which has made huge strides in usability over previous versions. Mail was great, but it choked on my large email mailboxes, taking too long to simply open a mailbox once it had 3,000 or more messages in it. After I wrote a quick review about the process of moving my mail archive from Eudora into Mail I was tempted to try yet another email client, a demo version of Mailsmith from Bare Bones Software. I was frustrated by the user interface and by head-to-head searching tests that showed that Mailsmith was much slower completing searches than either Eudora or Mail. And so, to be fair, I had to take a look at the same search using PowerMail.

Migrating 29,000 messages from Eudora to PowerMail

PowerMail did an admirable job helping me move all of my current email from Eudora to PowerMail, simply by using the Import scripts built into PowerMail under File > Database > Import. In the past I imported my email into PowerMail one mailbox at a time, but this time I imported all of my email in one fell swoop. PowerMail imported my entire email archive, organized just as it was under Eudora. The downside of this was that it took more than two hours to complete the operation.

While PowerMail does an excellent job importing email, it also does a good job integrating Eudora address book info through the same import dialog used for importing email. And since PowerMail works with Apple's Address Book application, it then can sync all of the email addresses I had under Eudora into the Address Book. Address integration was much speedier than importing my email, which was not surprising given the size of my email database.

Speaking of email databases, PowerMail does use a database to hold all of your email and in all of the years I have used the program prior to my switch to Eudora in September, I have never experienced serious database problems with the program. CTM Development, the creators of PowerMail, offer some good database maintenance tools with PowerMail that can be accessed when you start up the program while using a special keyboard combo and using those tools has solved any problems I ever encountered in the past.

The last leg of the transition process from Eudora to PowerMail is not so smooth. The way I manage my email is to filter incoming mail to a number of mailboxes, and these filters had to be created all over again in PowerMail. Thankfully, this was easier than creating new filters in Mail or Mailsmith. All I had to do was to go into the mailboxes into which I filter my mail and select a message in the mailbox, then Control-click on the message and choose Make filter from the drop-down menu. I simply set my filter parameters and saved the new filter and then moved on to repeat the process for each mailbox. It only took a few minutes to have my filtering working just as it did under Eudora.

Why make the move? Speed says it all

After spending a couple of hours importing all of my email, I was immediately reminded why I used PowerMail in the past. It is by far the fastest of any OS X email client. The first sign of this was in doing a comparison of email search speed, where PowerMail completed a search of its entire email database for one person's name in two seconds as compared to 20 seconds or more to do the same search in Eudora and Mail. Searching isn't the only speed advantage offered by PowerMail. When I receive new email it is immediately filtered into appropriate mailboxes, whereas there is a three to five second delay when filtering mail in Eudora. And switching from one mailbox to another, where the program has to display the new mailbox content in the three-paned mail browser, is much faster with PowerMail than it works with Mail.app. There is one caveat here though, and that is that PowerMail does delay when opening very large mailboxes, such as one of my birding-related mailboxes that holds 9,500 messages.

Once I experienced the advantages of a speedy email client after spending the last few months with Eudora, I couldn't see continuing to bear with the ancient user interface of Eudora. Now that my email was all in PowerMail, I figured I may as well make the return official. I set up my email scheduling and configured my email account information and had everything up and running in little time at all.

Overcoming PowerMail's limitations

PowerMail has a lot to offer as an email client that focuses on what is most important about email - speed, reliability, and integration with Mac OS X features like Apple's Address Book application. PowerMail works nearly exclusively with plain text email. It can receive Rich Text and HTML emails and display them rendered within the mail browser or better yet rendered in your default Web browser, but you cannot use PowerMail to author HTML or Rich Text email messages. I use email to get real work done and it is not a big issue for me to communicate my ideas in plain text. If I need to ensure a message is formatted in a certain way, I am more likely to send an attached PDF file or other formatted document rather than rely on an email application to make my presentation for me.

The biggest shortcoming of PowerMail is that the application doesn't integrate junk mail filtering like Apple's Mail.app and Eudora. But this can be overcome by purchasing and configuring the add-on spam filtering application SpamSieve, which so far has shown itself to do a much better job catching junk mail than Eudora's SpamWatch feature. To get SpamSieve working with PowerMail, download the latest version and check the manual for the clear instructions for installing AppleScripts that work with PowerMail and then creating a new filter in PowerMail that will invoke one of those AppleScripts on each incoming email message. Once it is set up you can hardly tell that junk mail filtering is not built right into PowerMail.

Who should consider PowerMail?

PowerMail is not the email application for everyone. If you can't handle the limitations of dealing with plain text email then this isn't the solution for you. If you don't want to pay for your email application, stick with Mail.app. If you want built-in junk mail filtering, Mail.app or Eudora may be better bets. But if you want a powerful and fast email client that works reliably with large volumes of mail, PowerMail is worth a look. PowerMail carries a $49 purchase price, and if you want to avoid growing levels of spam, consider spending another $25 to purchase SpamSieve. Both programs have demo versions. Discuss