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This is a review of SweetMail 2.1, but I'm first going to talk about Eudora for a bit, for reasons that will become evident. In my estimation, Eudora Light is one of the great personal computer applications of all time. Originally written by Steve Dorner when he was an employee of the University of Illinois, back when the Internet was still the exclusive domain of geeks and academics, Eudora was pretty much right from the start, and Eudora Light is still the standard by which I judge all email applications for speed, slickness, and convenience. It's one of a very few applications I use regularly that makes me remark to myself frequently about what a great piece of software it is. Eudora Light virtually never crashes, has never lost any message data in my experience, and is the fastest email client I've ever used. Actually, I was a Eudora user before I was hooked up to the Internet, back when the only Web access within 50 miles was via four mediocre PCs at the local library. The way that worked was that each subscriber had a floppy disk with his/her own Eudora settings file on it from which one would boot up Eudora on the library machine to check one's email account. You could download your Eudora email inbox and take it home to review it at your leisure on your home computer. Because the PC and Mac versions of Eudora both used the same mailbox file format, the compatibility issue was nonexistent. Naturally, when I got my own Internet hookup, the first day it was available in this neck of the woods, I continued using Eudora Light has my email client. And I still use it every day, albeit lately for just one account -- an e-mail list that I moderate. However, Eudora Light does have some shortcomings. It doesn't support multiple accounts. Its filtering and search capacities are really not up to much, and it doesn't support SMTP authentication. I worked around the lack of support for multiple accounts by using a simple Res Edit hack that enabled multiple copies of Eudora Light to run simultaneously with differently-named Eudora Folders, but dead end looming in the near future is that there is no OS X support. Actually, Qualcomm, which took over Eudora development in 1992, hasn't supported Eudora Light since 1999, and the last version upgrade was in early 1997, although it still works fine in OS 9.2. The freeware Eudora Light function was integrated into the multi-mode Eudora 4.3 when the latter was released. However, while I like Eudora 4.3 and its successor versions 5.0 and 5.1, and I consider them to be the most powerful email client available for the Mac, they don't bring a smile to my face the way Eudora Light does. They feel and are more ponderous, and more sluggish in response than EL is. But of course, they have a vast array of enhanced features, but are just not as nice to use as their smaller predecessor is, although I prefer them to Outlook Express and Entourage a wide margin. Eudora 5.1, the current version, also is somewhat less stable than Eudora Light. It doesn't crash a lot, but when does, it usually requires a restart, even if the crash didn't take the system down. I've never enable to get the filters working properly, and it refuses to send out pure plain text e-mail, even though I have the "send plain text mail only" preference checked in the Settings. A reinstall recently didn't fix these problems. Nevertheless, I will continue using Eudora 5.1 and successors indefinitely, because nothing else manages multiple email accounts and large volumes of e-mail archives as gracefully, and I have several hundred megabytes of Eudora mailboxes. I need an OS X e-mail client to manage that discussion list, and I also need to maintain backward compatibility to OS 9. Adding that account to the dozen or so that I already manage in Eudora 5.1 seemed the logical solution, and I tried it for a few days, but list members protested receiving postings with HTML code in them, and as mentioned above, I have been unsuccessful in my attempts to turn the HTML off. I personally detest formatted email, and consider Eudora Light's non-support of it to be a feature, not a bug. The other logical modern alternative to Eudora Light is SweetMail, a very nice e-mail client written by Japanese developer S. Ichise, a freeware/shareware author living in Kanagawa, Japan. Indeed, SweetMail might have been my first choice if it supported standard Unix mbox mailboxes. I was able to simply drag copies of my Eudora Light mailboxes into Eudora 5.1, and they show up and open just fine -- a great convenience. However, and many other respects, SweetMail is arguably more like the classic Eudora than Eudora is itself these days, and that's neither accident nor coincidence. Mr. Ichise says that he, like me, is a big fan of the classic Eudora, and that his vision for SweetMail is to develop a modern e-mail application along the lines of what Eudora Light might have been become head Qualcomm not abandoned it in favor of an all-in-one solution tacked onto the everything-including-the-kitchen-sink high-end Eudora application. "I liked Eudora-1.8.x in the old days," Mr. Ichise told me, "so, basically SweetMail's operation is similar to it. "At first, I began to make a basic modern interface with Drag & Drop Manager, Thread Manager and Appearance Manager. I paid attention to not using diffusive modal-dialogs, and not leaving the user waiting. As a result, I got a very smooth interface. 
"As a second step, I added new features: high-speed sorting, high-speed search, attachment files as MIME multipart, handling HTML-messages with an external browser, clickable URLs, inline image display, hierarchical mailboxes, filters, multiple signatures, templates, and mailbox-preferences. and in recent versions, thread-view, clickable message-id, realtime auto-wrap, and auto-indent. "Especially... "Related messages are displayed in a thread. Thread view generates relation automatically by reading the 'In-Reply-To:' header field on receiving/importing. Very, very high speed switching through plain view to thread view. The interface to cut & paste relation manually is easy to use. "SweetMail's high speed search is very quick, and you get Intelligent word wrap while typing." SweetMail supports multiple email accounts and SMTP authentication, and has a wide variety of interface customization preference options. I like its light, agile feel. I am not a fan of bloatware. Here is an analogy: SweetMail feels like a sports car, while Eudora 5.0 feels more like a pickup truck -- a very nice and powerful pickup truck, but still somewhat ponderous (although the program is actually not an awful lot larger). In actual numbers, SweetMail is 2.1 MB (legacy application), and requires a minimum 2048k of memory. Messages are stored in a Mail Spool folder inside the application folder. Another advantage SweetMail has is that it supports everything from 68k Macs to OS X. SweetMail's user interface is very nice in its default mode, but you can also customize it to your heart's content using SweetMail's extensive user preferences. And like Eudora Light, there is no program interface or toolbar cluttering up your desktop unless you open a window -- just menu selections on the menu bar -- a motif I much prefer to the single-window, multi-pane interface of Outlook Express and several other email clients. Like Eudora, SweetMail disappears except for its Menu bar when there are no windows open. However, can customize the window header appearance in the Preferences with your choice from 16 different themes, a few of which appear below. I am quite partial to the default appearance, which uses a lot of light grays, blues, and pink, much like the late afternoon winter sky I saw today on a hike along my snowy woods trails. For more on color customization in SweetMail, see the appendix. 
In preparing this review, I decided to try an experiment with mailbox compatibility. I copied my SweetMail Inbox file to the Desktop, and opened it in ResEdit. The immediate portents were not promising. ResEdit noted that the file had no resource fork and warned that if I continued to open the file a resource fork would be created. I decided that there was nothing to lose in continuing, so I proceeded. I selected "Get Info" from the File menu and changed the SweetMail file type and creator codes to their Eudora equivalents and saved the changes. When I closed the file the Finder icon had changed to a familiar Eudora mailbox. I dragged the hacked mailbox into the Eudora folder for one of my copies of Eudora Light and started the application. Lo and behold, there was the doctored SweetMail Inbox in the mailboxes list, and when I selected it from the menu it opened after a little hesitation and displayed all the messages just as if it had been created in Eudora. The individual messages opened and looked fine too.
Now, could I reverse the process successfully? I reopened the file in ResEdit, restored the original file type and creator codes, renamed the file, and dragged it back into the SweetMail mailbox folder. Unfortunately, when I started up SweetMail it would not recognize the altered mailbox. I have to assume that the resource fork that was added by ResEdit is the reason for rejection. However, I wasn't done yet. The SweetMail manual said that
The following applications' mail files can be directly read:
So I created a new SweetMail mailbox file, named it "test," and dragged the hacked Inbox file into its window. Success! SweetMail read the contents of the file and displayed it in the window as it had originally appeared. So we can have full forward and backward compatibility between SweetMail and Eudora by employing a bit of ResEdit work. You can also import mail.lboxes using the 'Special' menu. Select 'Import Mail File...' and navigate to the files you want to import. You can import multiple files and choose to apply filtering. Like Eudora, SweetMail allows you to create as many mailboxes as you like, unlike the Microsoft email clients, which store everything in one humongous file. You can even rename the Inbox, Drafts and Trash Mailboxes, and use Drag & Drop to reorder your mailboxes in the 'Mailbox' menu. You can drag Mailboxes into other Mailboxes to organize them in a hierarchical manner. There are a variety of keyboard commands for navigating in and controlling mailboxes. In Mac OS X a 'Mail Spool' folder is created for every different user who logs in. With the legacy OS, SweetMail does not provide for a real multiuser structure (where two or more different users use SweetMail on one Mac). However, by creating a number of 'Mail Spool' folders, it can function like a multiuser program. You can find more detailed instructions in the online user manual. Another interesting SweetMail feature is the Whole List Mailbox, which is a "virtual" mailbox that displays all messages in one window, and includes a 'Mailbox' column which shows the location of the messages. The Unread List Mailbox is another virtual mailbox showing all unread messages. The New Arrivals Mailbox is a virtual mailbox showing messages that have just been received, opening automatically if allowed by Preferences('Rcv/Snd' tab). It functions like the other mailboxes, but unlike the 'Unread List' and 'Whole List' mailboxes, it does not have an icon in the Mailbox List window. Its existence is ephemeral, and it can't be recalled once its window is closed. It allows you to preview your incoming messages and delete spam at that stage. Typically, a POP server stores your e-mail until you retrieve it, at which point it is transferred into your hard drive and deleted from the POP server. This is fine if you only use one e-mail client. But if you are checking e-mail from a mobile phone, another computer or public terminal, or if you use more than one mail client program, you can use SweetMail's handy Remote Mail function to retrieve your e-mail and still keep it in the POP server. The SweetMail Address Book can import contact information from Eudora address books. SweetMail also has good filter protocols. To add a sender to the Address Book, from the 'Special' menu, select "Add this address." 
To perform searches, select 'Search' from the 'Message' pull-down menu to open a custom 'Find' dialog box. This powerful search tool allows you to combine a narrow set of search criteria to quickly find specific messages. 
SweetMail's threading also allows advanced management of messages, and facilitating sorting by a variety if criteria. You can save messages as text files using the 'Save As' command from the 'File' menu. The small 'Header Display' button at the top of the scroll bar. In this example, the message header is hidden. By clicking the 'Header Display' button, or selecting 'Window View' in the 'Special' menu, the message header can be hidden, displayed as preferred or in full. The message header setting is retained when opening other messages. Preferred (or default) header fields are chosen in the Preference section's 'Header' tab. The subject and message content of received mail can be edited. Click 'Edit' in the message tool bar, make the changes then click 'Done' to save the message, or 'Cancel' to exit without saving. You can show or hide the tool bar, header or footer by selecting 'Window View' from the 'Special' menu. There are also a few text formatting functions available, including adjustable text wrap with a ruler, and automatic indents. For pages that do not fit entirely in the page, the 'Previous' and 'Next' buttons change into 'Back' or 'More' buttons to display the part of the message that is out of view. When the cursor passes over URL strings in messages, it changes to a hand cursor if the links are clickable. If it is, the web browser or ftp client assigned by the Internet Control Panel is launched to access the link. Message ID strings can be clicked to open the related messages. The cursor changes to the hand cursor when it passes over clickable ID strings. SweetMail can display jpeg images in the body of a message, if allowed by Preferences. You can drag the icon of an attached file and drop it on the desktop, a folder, or an application. Alternatively, double-click the icon to launch it in the appropriate application. You can attach files by simply dragging and dropping them into any place within the text and signature area of a message. To delete an attachment in Composer, select the icon (or image) and hit the 'delete' key. In summary, I think SweetMail's name pretty much says it. This is one sweet piece of email software. 
There is still a bit of room for improvement. SweetMail is not as crashproof as Eudora Light was (although I don't want to give the impression that it crashes a lot because it doesn't. There are still a few angularities with the interface, such as the program doesn't support the "Home" and "End" keys on my keyboard ("Page Up" and "Page Down" work). It's faster than Eudora 5.1, but not as fast as Eudora Light (or Nisus Email). However, that's about it for complaints that I can think of. I'm giving SweetMail 2.1 an Applelinks rating of four smileys. 
System requirements:
A brand-new Cocoa version for OS X will be released in spring. SweetMail is $28.00 shareware.
For more information, visit:
Appendix - Sweetmail Preferences
Page: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5
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