The native OS X version of the Runtime Solution for eMA (to allow use of the program without FileMaker Pro) worked just fine, and I was able to test the program.
Unfortunately, as Wayne predicted, the encoding for two-byte characters (messages in Japanese) was trashed, and all archived Japanese text is displayed as strings of question marks in the message body. Needless to say, this limits the usefulness of the program for me, as about 10% of my mail traffic is in Japanese, or contains some Japanese characters. At the present time, my main PowerMail database is, like most people, several thousand (about 20,000) messages. I have had only one database problem in a year of PM use, and it's own fixit utility took care of that. I have no speed problems with PM, either, despite the message volume. So why am I intersted in eMA? Searches. (are you listening Jerome?) PM has the weakest search functions of any major e-mail app I've seen. For the record, Eudora had the best. Entourage has good search functions, but peformance is horrible, taking FOREVER to complete a search (15 minutes or more to complete a body text search on 20,000+ messages on my previous Titanium PB/800). I want to be able to search on a specific header or the body, for a specific word or phrase, and show exact matches only, quickly and easily. With PM, I get huge numbers of hits that I have to wade through in a time-consuming way. Some of the "hits" don't even contain the words I've searched for at times! I don't know if it's a Sherlock-engine issue or what (I'm no programmer), but just reverse- engineer Eudora or something. It's searches were brilliant. Maybe I'm not using it right. Or maybe it will be improved. Of course, I cannot study the software myself to see if I'm using it correctly, because there's no updated manual! The one supplied with the software is three years old and for a previous version. And none of the recent improvements have been documented anywhere either. Sorry to gripe here, Jerome, I love PM or I wouldn't be using it, but for a PAID program not to have proper documentation supplied is just not cool. This cannot be winked away as a cute idiosyncrasy just because the users on this list tend to be reasonably computer-literate. There's a lot of freeware floating around that's far better documented. None of this would irritate me this much if it wasn't the single most important application on my computer. When the developer adds AppleScript support, the superb GyazMail may very well end up as my primary e-mail app if these issues are not resolved. --- Scott T. Hards President HobbyLink Japan (www.hlj.com)
