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I’m a big fan of S. Ichise’s SweetMail email client, which I use for my Applelinks email account and several others. It reminds me more of my old favorite Eudora Light than the current version of Eudora does. SweetMail has been available in both Classic and Carbon iterations, but a Cocoa version has been promised for some time now, and it has finally been released as a beta, with a new name, Namera. 
I downloaded Namera last evening and gave it a whirl. Unfortunately, the Read Me documentation and Web site info is still in Japanese only, so I had to get along by trial and error. 
The name change is appropriate, because Namera is a completely new application by appearances, with a very attractive interface, complete with a slide-out drawer. That’s cool, but I’m not as happy with some of the menu changes -- one glaring deficiency being the lack of provision to check just one email account individually. New are a threaded message view, IMAP4 support, and more powerful filters. There is now a button for attaching files, and multiple files can be attached. 
As with SweetMail, Nomura is extensively configurable using its Preferences, which, incidentally, is where the Accounts setup dialog has moved from the File Menu where it is in SweetMail. The font preference dialog is especially cool. 
While it looks great, and has obvious potential to be one of the nicest OS X email clients, I found this beta build of Namera to be still pretty buggy. For example, when I tried copy/paste in my account info in from SweetMail, the account dialog would erase what I had pasted in as soon as I clicked out of it to make another selection. I had to type the information in manually, and then save it before clicking out. Also, I was unable to name accounts in the account list, so they all ended up being named “untitled”. And while my Applelinks account configured OK and worked, I had problems getting a mac.com account to connect, and finally gave up and called it a night. 
The program would sometimes hang when trying to open windows, although it didn’t crash. I don’t think I’m ready to commit my email operation to this application quite yet. It sould be considered an early preview, but a very interesting one. When I, and Namera, are ready, there is an import command to bring in message archives from SweetMail (or OS X Mail if you use it). However, unfortunately, you can’t just drag the SweetMail Mail Spool file in, which eliminates backwards compatibility with Sweet Mail for OS 9. Because Namera is a Cocoa application, it can access Cocoa Services such as the OS X built-in spell checker. 
Nice job so far, Mr. Ichise. I look forward to future developments. New in this version: System requirements:
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