It’s been a while since the latest public update of MailMate was released, but this does not mean that development has slowed down. The main reason for the unusual amount of time between updates is that MailMate has not yet been sandboxed and this is now a requirement for distributing through the Mac App Store. MailMate is still not sandboxed and a consequence of this release is that MailMate is no longer for sale in the Mac App Store. Don’t worry, if you have the App Store version of MailMate then you can send an email using the “Help ▸ Send Feedback…” menu item in MailMate (the App Store version) and I’ll make sure you’ll soon receive a regular license key. It is not yet decided when (if ever) MailMate returns to the Mac App Store.

Version 1.5 is likely to be the last major release with support for Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6). Expect version 1.6 to require Mac OS X Lion.

As usual detailed release notes are available. Here are some of the highlights:

  • Support for S/MIME and OpenPGP.
  • Updated to use Growl Framework 2.0 for notifications. This means MailMate now supports Mac OS X Notifications on Mountain Lion with or without Growl installed.
  • Codesigned with a Developer ID certificate from Apple making MailMate work with Gatekeeper (Mountain Lion security feature).
  • Support for searching LDAP servers when autocompleting names/addresses in the composer. Currently no GUI for this feature. Read more about it in the manual page about “Hidden Preferences”.
  • Using AppleScript it is now possible to create (and optionally send) messages with attachments.
  • Numerous IMAP fixes including several workarounds for buggy IMAP servers.
  • Workaround for a bug in OS X 10.8.2 triggered when using AESendMessage to send AppleScript events. This affected users of SpamSieve. Every message sent to SpamSieve would hang and then time out (after 2 minutes) making MailMate seem extremely slow.
  • HTML body parts in emails are now properly indexed for searching.
  • Numerous performance optimizations.