>Has anyone tried MailSmith? I don't think I have the stomach >for another experiment right now, but I'd appreciate hearing people's >experiences.
Mailsmith is a powerful program, but for me has a fatal flaw: It cannot handle Unicode or text encoding of any kind. If your dealing with mail in any languages other than plain English or other simple roman, you're out of luck. Given internationalization, it's pretty stunning to me that a supposedly "major" e-mail program would not be able to handle encoding. I've pasted below a copy of a reply I got from the Mailsmith folks about this very issue. Eudora also is lame in a similar way: You can only set one font for text display. So if I want to be able to read Japanese mail in Eudora, I have to set a Japanese font for all my mail, and read my English mail in a Japanese font as well. Which means I don't get to read in my beloved Verdana. <-_-> I'm sorry to hear about your problems with Powermail, but pleased to report that I've never had anything like that occur in one year of intense use. All the trouble I've ever had (2 or 3 times only) was quickly solved with the start-up troubleshooting tools. I don't think I've ever been as happy with an e-mail client before as I am with PM right now. I've mentioned here before, and I'll mention again: Unless you must have IMAP, another very fine program to take a look at is GyazMail. The designer (it's unbelievably a one-man program!) is actively developing it. It currently lacks scripting support, but other than that, it's a very nice little package, and it has a gorgeous cocoa interface (hint, hint, Jerome). See it at http://gyazsquare.com >Scott, > >Thanks for taking a look at Mailsmith. > >At this time Mailsmith is only capable of dealing with single byte >western/roman languages. > >We would like to include the capabilities that you seek, but I cannot >speculate when that will appear in shipping software. > >Unfortunately at this time if you need to deal with Japanese mail I'm >afraid Mailsmith is not going to meet your needs. > >Let us know if we can be of further assistance. > >Regards, >Jim > >-------Original Message-------- >From: "Scott at HobbyLink Japan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 12:48:30 +0900 >To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Subject: Multilingual/Unicode capabilities of Mailsmith > >Just to confirm before I decide, based on this single point alone, that >Mailsmith won't meet my needs, does Mailsmith 2.0 have any ability to >handle Unicode/multi-byte character sets? By "handle" I mean I shouldn't >have to preset everything to a font which can handle all languages I >might get mail in. More specifically, since much of my mail is in >Japanese, I want the mailer to be able to display Japanese mail properly >even if my main font for display is set to a single-byte font such as Verdana. > >Most other e-mail packages can do this, but I have difficulties during >attempts to test Mailsmith 2.0 today. --- Scott T. Hards President HobbyLink Japan (www.hlj.com)
