A few weeks ago I launched a crowd funding experiment and I already wrote about the results. The conclusion was that it was worth a shot to launch a campaign on a real crowd funding site.

Help me get a flying start by going to indiegogo. Please also help me spread the word wherever you think it is appropriate. The short link for the crowd funding page is simply http://igg.me/at/mailmate.

Compared to the crowd funding experiment I’ve changed a few things. The goal is now to fund the time needed to finish version 2.0 of MailMate. This requires a minimum of 6 months of 2014 and therefore I’ve set the initial fixed goal to $25,000. A fixed goal means that I get nothing if the goal is not reached. Anything beyond $25,000 increases the period I am guaranteed to work full time on MailMate. The exact period depends on daily sales, but a rough estimate is an additional month for every $5,000.

I am also releasing MailMate 1.7.1 today. See the release notes for the details. The highlights are:

  • New: Added option in the General preferences pane for enabling experimental 2.0 features (rules and commands).
  • New: A Gmail label column is shown in the Tags preferences if the user has any Gmail accounts. Any tag with a Gmail label defined is not fetched as an IMAP mailbox.
  • New: Hold down ⌃⌥ when selecting a message in the message list to select all related messages. The result depends on the column selected (the selection matches the search conditions for double clicking).
  • New: The selectWithFilter: key binding has been changed to accept a format string. This can be used to select messages related to the current message. For example, here is the definition for a shortcut (⌃⌥D) to select all messages from the same sender and delete them: "^~d" = ( "selectWithFilter:", "from.address = '${from.address}'", "moveToMailbox:", "trash" );

I also added a replyMessage action for bundle commands (undocumented 2.0 feature) since I needed it to be able to generate “canned” replies for all the emails I’ve received as part of the crowd funding experiment. Based on a simple 7-line property list file (no GUI yet), a reply can be generated with a prefixed thank-you-note including a “Dear”-string based on the From header. With a single keystroke I can now generate these messages in the Drafts mailbox and then, if I need to, edit some of them before sending. How is that not worth a contribution?