As described in the previous blog post, a very dedicated MailMate user, Matt Petrowsky, has created a series of screencasts about how he uses MailMate. Last week I commented on the first two episodes and today I’ll comment on episodes 3 and 4.

Here’s a link to the entire list of screencasts: MailMate: The Killer Email App for Mac OS.

Note that since last week, Matt also created an additional screencast covering a specific new (minor) feature of MailMate.

Episode 3: Working with Messages (8:12)

I don’t really have much to comment on for this one. It might be interesting to know that the red link indicator that Matt mentions is triggered whenever a textually displayed link address does not match the actual page linked to. For example, it would be triggered by HTML like this:

<a href="http://example.com/potentially_bad_hidden_link">http://example.com/the_displayed_link</a>

Matt applauds the ability to display multiple messages in the message view, but he also notes that it does not work well for HTML messages. I completely agree with that. Ironically, a fix to this problem would very likely break the ability to select the text of all displayed emails in one go.

Episode 4: Key Bindings (9:31)

Matt mentions Xcode, but it’s not really needed for editing custom key bindings. A plain text editor is fine since the property list files used by MailMate are mostly in a readable and easily editable plain text format. (After using the property list editor distributed with Xcode to save the file then this has likely changed to an XML format.)

Another detail is that Matt disables the default Gmail key bindings file. He doesn’t really need to do that. He could have put his additions/changes into a file named, e.g., Matt and then configured key bindings (in the General preferences pane) with a comma separated list of files like this: Matt, Gmail. This is not very important, but it would ensure that changes I do to the default Gmail file are not ignored.

If anything, this screencast illustrates that it would be very nice if MailMate had an embedded editor for changing custom key bindings.

As Matt mentions, the main resource for key bindings is the manual page. I’d like to also emphasize the list of available key binding selectors.

Matt also mentions the powerful HTML features of MailMate. Here I’d like to emphasize that even though MailMate can do a lot of things with HTML then most users are still going to experience that MailMate has a very basic plain text composer. The rationale for this can be found in the manual. I’m primarily mentioning this, because it’s likely to be a deal breaker for many trial users of MailMate.

That’s it for today. Thanks again, Matt!