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The trouble with Mailsmith

I don't get this. First we get Macworld on Mailsmith

For some users, Mailsmith 2.0 is unquestionably a necessary upgrade. Its lack of support for IMAP mail servers and certain non-English languages will put off some people...

"Put off some people?" Kind of a strange choice of phrase if you ask me. Look. If it's POP-only, I can't use it. All the mail servers I do business with do IMAP.

Then we get John Gruber on the same program:

That said, Mailsmith is not for everyone. Most notably, Mailsmith does not support IMAP, only POP. IMAP users have an unflattering tendency to break into conniptions each time Mailsmith is revised, yet again with IMAP absent from the feature list. It’s an odd thing to take personally.

Well, almost as odd as an major email client that still, at least 4 years after its initial release, still only supports POP. POP-only clients were pretty common way back when Mailsmith 1.0 came out, but in the intervening years, most of the major Mac mail clients have learned to speak IMAP. You'd think BareBones would want to get more people to buy the product. I mean, it's not like I'm asking it to talk to Exchange servers or something. I'm not so much breaking into conniptions as I am shaking my head in bewilderment, and the only explanation I cam come up with is that, given their tone, Mr Gruber and the folks at Macworld think that either:

1) IMAP is written in Cocoa, not Carbon; or
2) it is somehow associated with Microsoft.

Posted by John on November 5, 2003 9:35 PM |