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Product: E-mail

Developer: CTM Development

Minimum Requirements: Mac OS X v10.2

Review Computer: 1GHz G4 17" PowerBook, 512MB RAM, Mac OS X v10.3.7

Retail Price: 49 Euros ($63.87 US at press time); multi-user licenses available

Availability: Out now

I've almost reached the point where I feel it's pretty much pointless to review e-mail programs for the Macintosh. Undoubtedly, PC reviewers feel the same way on their platform. Because Microsoft offers Outlook Express for free with their operating system, because Apple offers Mail for free every Mac purchased, and because both programs are actually pretty good, the majority of computer users are never going to bother looking elsewhere.

CTM Development's PowerMail brings another challenge to the table, in that it was originally conceived as a replacement for Claris Em@iler, which most won't even remembers, and which was far and away my favorite e-mail program at the time. I had no desire to switch to Eudora when Em@iler was taken away from us, and there were precious few other options available at the time. This is why the early versions of PowerMail seemed like a god-send to me, even though they had their share of problems.

It's ironic, then, that as PowerMail grows better with each version, it becomes harder for me to recommend people switch to it. At around $64 dollars given the current Euro/USD exchange rate, it's priced well above Mail (which is free, after all) and slightly above Eudora ($49.95).

On the other hand, I'm assuming there are many like me who just can't get into using Mail. In speaking about it with our illustrious leader, Joe Ryan, we both agreed that we just never feel like we're in control of Mail. It feels more like a program being forced on us and maintained by an IT department than by ourselves. Perhaps this is why, after upgrading my system this year, I tried for about a month to work strictly in Mail, but ended up keeping only my work account there while falling back to PowerMail to handle my many personal accounts.

Why do I do that? First of all, PowerMail makes more sense straight out of the box, as it were (there is no box; it's download only). Although you can kind of get Mail to behave the way you want it to, PowerMail's presets are better suited to getting work done. It behaves more like an e-mail program right away, and less like an extension of another program (as most of Apple's applications do). Secondly, I prefer the interface over Mail's. That's not to say you will, of course, but I found that PowerMail places more information and tools at your immediate disposal without having to muck around with Mailboxes and such (I prefer having my accounts and folders in a separate pane versus keeping them in a fly-out window). And third, PowerMail offers more options for controlling how your e-mail is viewed and handled.

The drawback to this degree of control, of course, is that it requires a more extensive set-up. It sounds like I'm contradicting my earlier statement about PowerMail being ready straight out of the box, but I don't think this is so. PowerMail looks right and behaves right straight away, but you can dig much, much deeper to access more powerful tools.

Not everything in PowerMail is better, though. Although the new built-in spam filters are welcome, they're not as intelligent as those in Mail. When I define a spam message as "Junk" in Mail, I can usually forget about ever again seeing spam from that account. In PowerMail, the exact same spam mail would keep sliding right on through. I played with these auto spam settings numerous times, and was never able to achieve satisfactory results. The old method, though, of setting up and defining my own filters continues to work just fine. PowerMail now also offers tight integration with SpamSieve, but as I don't have a SpamSieve account, I was unable to test this feature.

Along with the new spam filters, PowerMail offers improved HTML reading. I always shut this feature off (like snail mail, the only messages worth receiving are those that aren't littered with clip art and stock photography), but I was quite impressed with how PowerMail handled HTML messages during my testing period. PowerMail now uses Safari HTML rendering, and I found this to be quick and error free. It's not enough to convince me that HTML e-mails makes the slightest bit of sense, but those who aren't bothered by it should be pleased by what PowerMail can do here.

Another big change between PowerMail v5 and the previous incarnations involves the appearance and the customizability of that appearance. You now have pretty complete control over the toolbars and such, and, as with Mail, getting everything where you want it is a simple matter of dragging and dropping. The buttons are now more Aqua-like, although this does lead to some confusion. PowerMail's address book can now be called up using a button that looks like the icon for Apple's Address Book program, but the two aren't directly related; if you add an address to PowerMail's address book it doesn't automatically appear in Address Book. Likewise, e-mail addresses in Address Book aren't readily available in PowerMail. Instead, you have to manually sync the two, or at least program PowerMail to automatically perform the synchronizations. It's a fairly simple process, and honestly, I liked that the two don't automatically talk to each other. As I mentioned earlier, I use PowerMail for my personal accounts and Mail for work, and I don't want to clutter up PowerMail with addresses and information I don't need in there.

The final major improvement I see in PowerMail is with its find feature. Using the FoxTrot engine, searching your e-mail archives is amazingly quick and accurate. What's more, it's much easier to use than Mail's search feature, both in searching and in sifting through the results. Indexing happens unnoticably in the background (before, I had to manually index any recent messages before conducting a search), and more search options are now available to you.

A full list of new features and updates can be found at the CTM Development website, so check that out to see if anything you've been looking for is now available. Not everything I wanted to see addressed in previous versions has been tackled, but enough has that I feel an upgrade is warranted for current PowerMail users. I'm not sure it's enough to warrant a switch from the Apple's free Mail program, but I do recommend that those who are even only slightly dissatisfied with Mail give PowerMail a trial run. Importing your accounts and messages is a painless process, and you can easily keep PowerMail and Mail synched up during your trail period. If it's not enough to convince you to shell out the bucks for PowerMail, it'll at least give you quite a few items to add to your Mail feature wish-list.