Dave N (10/6/08, 23:22) said: >Review of PowerMail in new July 2008 MacWorld magazine > >And PowerMail didn't do well. It got only 2.5 Mice out of 5
My main problem with PowerMail is that it uses a monolithic database format that can't be larger than 2 GB. Currently, I have to compact the database at least once a week to avoid corruption :( I don't know if any of its competitors have this problem - Apple Mail certainly doesn't. Apart from the inconvenience of having to compact the database regularly (it takes about 30 minutes to do this on my 2GHz iMac), another problem with the monolithic file format is that incremental backups (Retrospect, Time Machine, whatever) have to back up the entire database each time it changes. With Apple Mail, all that gets backed up are the changed mailboxes. This wasn't mentioned in the review. If it had been, I think it would have justified a 2-mouse rating. If CTM can fix this problem, I would be happy to continue using and recommending PowerMail over other clients. Searching and filtering are much better than Apple Mail. PowerMail is great at handling a large email corpus (I have over 300,000 emails) - so long as you don't get anywhere near the 2 GB limit. I haven't contributed to the discussion on the MacWorld web page, because I'm hopeful that CTM will reconsider their previous decision to leave this problem unfixed, and I don't want to leave negative comments in a public forum. PowerMail has other weaknesses, besides those mentioned in the review, but the 2 GB limit is its most serious weakness for me personally. Jeremy
