The past couple of weeks, several users have reviewed MailMate at the MacUpdate site. It is very much appreciated when users take the time to share their thoughts about MailMate and it is even better when it is accompanied by 5-star ratings. The following are some favorite excerpts:

David Levy:

MailMate is, in my view, the first serious power-user IMAP email client. The power is tremendous in terms of configuring your mail viewing and display exactly as you would like. Second, almost everything can be done from the keyboard. including filing messages and moving to arbitrary mailboxes. The application is lean and fast and, in my view, saves time. It is also a new codebase with proper Cocoa underpinnings so it works well with other apps.

When Mail.app came out in OS X 10.0 and 10.1 it was a great application. Now it seems slow, inefficient to use at times and too much aimed at very ordinary mail use. You have to trick it out with extensions from indev to get enough power.

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Try it out, give it a good long run, because the power will become more apparent over time.

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Sherman Wilcox:

[…] if you take MailMate for a test spin, spend some time with it. You’ll immediately see some power and flexibility, but after several hours of using it you’ll also discover remarkable conveniences and efficiencies that aren’t obvious at first. And by all means email the developer. He’s quite responsive and helpful.

If you’re a heavy email user, this is an application to keep your eye on. It’s missing some features I’d like, but even at 1.0 it will make your workflow much more efficient. It has the power features to match your work style and make it better.

Macmath17:

I’ve always liked Mail.app, but in the past year or two it has become slower than I’d like and it doesn’t work with GMail as well as I’d like. So I’ve been on the lookout for another email application when last summer I saw MailMate. I tried it a bit and although it was a work-in-progress, by September I had purchased a license. It was shortly after the first of this year that I finally went to using MailMate full-time and leaving Mail.app closed, but I wish I had made the switch earlier. The email applications that I’ve been using all these years, have essentially the same paradigm. Now that I’ve been using MailMate full time I found that I’ve been moving away from that paradigm to a more efficient way of viewing, writing, and navigating my email. Every now and again I’ll discover something new and useful about MailMate and become yet more efficient in how I do things.

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The author (who is a responsive as they come) adds thoughtful features from a fresh view and does them well. Then he moves on to another feature and gives it a fresh look. So MailMate might not have all of your favorite features yet. Some of those will be coming over time, and some you might find will be replaced by a better (but different and related) feature he’ll add.

Added March 25:

Sam Smolk:

MailMate is the answer to my dreams.

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Mailmate is fast, reliable, clean, and has a strong search engine which is as customizable as that of PowerMail, only of the 21th century. It supports Unicode. It is still actively developed—with a responsive author—which bodes well for the future. It is also written for Intel machines and OSX, which means a cleaner code than most, if not all.

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