Release Notes

Read the Introduction if you are new to MailMate (or if you have not read it before). Please remember that MailMate is shareware and that future development depends on your support. If MailMate is not the email client of your dreams then it would be greatly appreciated if you took the time to write a short note about your dreams to mm-feedback@freron.com.

If you bought MailMate in the Mac App Store then don’t forget that you can rate and review here. Note that it is not possible for a developer to reply to such reviews, so don’t forget to write to support if you have any problems.

Revision 2980 (Thursday, July 26, 2012) — Version 1.4.3

This revision is a candidate for an official update of MailMate to version 1.4.3. The following is a rewrite of the release notes since the latest official release (r2818/r2819). Note that the certificate used for code signing has changed and you are going to be asked about allowing MailMate to access passwords in the keychain. This should only happen once for each password.

Various features/changes

Optimizations

Multiple aspects of MailMate have been optimized. This should be noticeable for most users, in particular users with a large number of messages and/or mailboxes. Optimizations include:

Completion of recipient names/addresses

Extended mailto URL scheme to be used via AppleScript

It is now possible to create new messages in MailMate with attachments using AppleScript. It is also possible to send these messages without bring MailMate to the front.

For a long time, MailMate has supported the mailto URL scheme. For example, the following link creates a message with recipient, subject, and default body text:

	mailto:me@example.com?subject=Test&body=Body%20text

It can be used within HTML pages as a link, but it can also be called directly, for example, using the open command in the Terminal:

	open "mailto:me@example.com?subject=Test&body=Body%20text"

Using the open command it is also possible to specify the application to be used when creating the message:

	open -a MailMate "mailto:me@example.com?subject=Test&body=Body%20text"

Otherwise, the default email application is used (this can be configured in the General preferences pane in Apple Mail or MailMate).

MailMate now extends the mailto syntax to include some additional special parameters. These are attachment-url and send-now. For security reasons they are ignored except if the URL is provided via AppleScript. It can be done as follows using a single line in the Terminal:

	osascript -e 'open location "mailto:me@example.com?subject=Test&body=Body%20text&attachment-url=file:///full/path/to/file.txt&send-now=yes" with trust'

Note the important with trust part of the AppleScript command. This is needed to make sure MailMate does not ignore the special parameters.

In practice, all of this means that MailMate can now be integrated with applications which need to send messages with attachments. Examples for iCal and BusyCal are provided, but it is currently a bit tricky to use them since integration requires the developers of the applications to add scripts for MailMate (and don’t ever expect that to happen for iCal). For now, the scripts can be enabled as described below using the Terminal (assuming all applications are in /Applications).

iCal:

	mv /Applications/iCal.app/Contents/Resources/Scripts/Mail.scpt /Applications/iCal.app/Contents/Resources/Scripts/MailBackup.scpt
	ln -s /Applications/MailMate.app/Contents/SharedSupport/Other/iCal/Mail.scpt /Applications/iCal.app/Contents/Resources/Scripts/

BusyCal:

	mv /Applications/BusyCal.app/Contents/Resources/Scripts/MailAttachmentScript.scpt /Applications/BusyCal.app/Contents/Resources/Scripts/MailAttachmentScriptBackup.scpt
	ln -s /Applications/MailMate.app/Contents/SharedSupport/Other/BusyCal/MailAttachmentScript.scpt /Applications/BusyCal.app/Contents/Resources/Scripts/

Note that updating iCal/BusyCal or moving MailMate is going to break this feature.

An example script for LaunchBar (nightlies) is also included. It should be used with the “Preferences ▸ Actions ▸ Options ▸ Create Emails with” preferences item. The script is located here: MailMate.app/Contents/SharedSupport/Other/Launchbar/SentHandlers.scpt. LaunchBars should then allow you to create an email with any selected files attached (selected in the Finder).

IMAP

It is now possible to manipulate the use of namespaces for each IMAP account. This is important for some users, especially those needing to specify what is known as an IMAP prefix in most email clients (most often this is not necessary). The feature is described in the chapter about “Hidden Preferences” in the manual.

Gmails IMAP server does not report changes to IMAP keywords/flags including its read state (when watching for changes in the INBOX). As an experimental workaround, MailMate can now be told to regularly check for keyword changes. You can try it by running the following command in the terminal:

	defaults write com.freron.MailMate MmEnableKeywordsCheckInIDLEForGmail -bool YES

Other IMAP related changes are:

Experimental dual mode

Introduced a new layout class to handle multiple modes in a window. This is used to provide a dual-mode layout in which one can switch between list mode and message mode. To control it, a key binding is needed for nextMode:. To enable this layout, you need to do the following:

mkdir -p ~/Library/Application\ Support/MailMate/Resources/Layouts/Mailboxes/
cp /Applications/MailMate.app/Contents/Resources/Layouts/Mailboxes/dualMode.plist ~/Library/Application\ Support/MailMate/Resources/Layouts/Mailboxes/

And then edit dualMode.plist by removing the enabled = 0 line.

Bug fixes

Revision 2818 (Tuesday, March 27, 2012) — Version 1.4.2

Version 1.4.1 of MailMate unfortunately introduced a performance bug which under certain circumstances can make MailMate practically unusable (high CPU and disk usage). The problem is particularly bad with large mail stores. Thanks to the users helping identify and solve this issue. It is strongly recommended to update to version 1.4.2. (Note that version 1.4.2 works on Mac OS X Leopard as well.)

From address derivation for email aliases

Derivation of the From address for replies has been changed. Until now it has been based on a heuristic using the X-Original-To header and other similar headers, but examples from users have shown that this approach does not work well in general. As a replacement for the heuristic, an optional account setting named “Address Pattern” has been introduced. It is disabled by default. The value for this option must be a regular expression which describes the format of any aliases for the account. Read more about this in the account settings chapter in the Help Book (a help button has also been added to the account settings window).

Change focus using key bindings

Introduced makeFirstResponder: for key bindings. This can be used to bind a key to directly activate a view. The identifiers for the views can be found in the layout files, but here are the most likely use cases:

	"o" = ( "makeFirstResponder:", "mainOutline" );
	"m" = ( "makeFirstResponder:", "messageView" );
	"M" = ( "makeFirstResponder:", "mailboxesOutline" );

Other changes

Revision 2802 (Wednesday, March 21, 2012)

IMPORTANT: This is the last release of MailMate which supports Mac OS X Leopard (10.5). This affects roughly 2% of the current user base (even less if including Mac App Store users) which is about the same as the number of Mac OS X Mountain Lion users (10.8). This revision of MailMate disables the automatic software update when running MailMate on Leopard.

Revision 2801 (Thursday, March 15, 2012) — Version 1.4.1

Customizable swipe gestures

Trackpad gestures are now supported by MailMate. It has been implemented with customization in mind as described in the following. The 4 standard swipe directions, left, right, up, and down, are transformed into key down events with the unicode characters \U2193, \U2190, \U2192, and \U2191 (→ ← ↑ ↓). It is a bit of a hack, but it allows great flexibility with respect to what can now be done with gestures. By default, standard key bindings have been extended as follows:

	"→"      = "nextMessage:";
	"←"      = "previousMessage:";
	"↑"      = "previousThread:";
	"↓"      = "nextThread:";
	"^→"      = "nextUnreadMessage:";
	"^←"      = "previousUnreadMessage:";
	"^↑"      = "previousUnreadThread:";
	"^↓"      = "nextUnreadThread:";

The defaults may be changed (feedback is welcome), but in any case you can change it yourself using a custom set of key bindings. Swipe to archive, switch mailbox, delete messages, or whatever you like. As indicated by the defaults, it is possible to combine swipes with the use of modifier keys.

Other new keybindings

Based on a user request, the following actions are now available for binding keys to expand/collapse messages or threads in the messages outline (when organizing by thread):

	expand:
	collapse:
	expandThread:
	collapseThread:

In addition to toggleTag:, it is now also possible to explicitly set or remove tags:

	setTag:
	removeTag:

Improvements

Most importantly, a number of optimizations should result in faster startup time, smoother scrolling in the messages outline, and faster display of messages, in particular, for large message stores.

New hidden preferences

The following three boolean hidden preferences values are now available:

	MmMoveSentRepliesToMailboxOfRepliedMessage
	MmAddressCompletionMailbox
	MmNonPrivateNamespacesEnabled

The first one is self-explanatory, the second one can be used to control which messages are used for completion of email addresses in the composer, and the last one can be used to enable experimental support for non-private IMAP namespaces. Feedback is welcome, but none of these features should be considered complete.

Fixes

Revision 2651 (Saturday, December 17, 2011) — Version 1.4

Until this version of MailMate, during startup the user has been notified of any previous crashes and then offered the opportunity to submit them to Freron Software. This has been a very useful feature and crashes are now quite rare in general due to the fixes which have followed the crash reports sent. The feature still exists, but it has been simplified. The Preferences (⌘,) has a new setting where MailMate can be told to automatically send crash reports quietly. This is disabled by default, but you are automatically asked (once) to enable it if a crash report is found.

Reorganized and extended preferences

The Preferences (⌘,) window has been reworked and now contains 7 panes. Previously hidden preferences have been given a GUI and other preferences have been improved. “Software Update” has moved from the MailMate menu to its own pane and it has more detailed settings. In particular, you can configure it to automatically download beta versions of MailMate.

Markdown support

Markdown support is now available and you can enable it in “Preferences ▸ Composer”. The composer window is then going to include a Markdown-related menu in the status bar. You can read more about it in the Help Book, but essentially it means that you can write your messages in Markdown style and then MailMate is going to generate an HTML body part as an alternative to the plain text (Markdown) body part. Note that the composer has an alternative layout which makes it easier to experiment with this feature (see “View ▸ Layouts” when using the composer).

IMAP/SMTP

For new users, IMAP server subscriptions states are now ignored by default. This can be changed in the “Edit Subscriptions…” interface. For existing users (that is, existing databases) the default is still to respect server subscriptions.

The quest continues to support as many IMAP servers as possible. Some servers are more challenging (euphemism for buggy) than others, and some times servers reveal bugs in MailMate. The following are all of the IMAP related changes:

When sending a message fails then a “Try Later” option is now available. It’ll retry after 15 minutes and then present the requester again (if it fails again). Each time the retry delay is doubled. When quitting, MailMate notifies the user if any messages are on hold.

If sending while offline then messages are automatically queued for sending when going online again. The state of individual messages can be seen in the Drafts mailbox. Using hidden options it is also possible to delay sending any messages (the delay is measured in seconds):

	defaults write com.freron.MailMate MmSendMessageDelayEnabled -bool YES
	defaults write com.freron.MailMate MmSendMessageDelay -integer 60

Database rebuilding

MailMate now automatically offers to rebuild the database if an inconsistency is detected. The user is asked to choose between basing the rebuild on already downloaded messages or basing the rebuild on redownloading all messages. When based on downloaded messages, MailMate tries to maintain the usage history of signatures.

This is a major new feature even though you may never see it. The previous solution was to output an error to the system log and then simply terminate MailMate. It was not very user-friendly and it was difficult to recover manually.

Part of the implementation of this feature means that the UIDs of IMAP messages are now stored in file attributes. Also, moving messages between mailboxes is now done much more efficiently than it was before (on the local disk).

Other new features

Navigation keys have been for thread navigation (in the Messages menu for now). The corresponding selectors are next/previousThread: and next/PreviousUnreadThread: and they can be used for custom keybindings if needed. The default keys mirrors the keys for next/previous(Unread)Message: with the addition of the control key (⌃).

The From address of a message is now customizable. A “Customize…” menu item has been added to the From-menu. This opens a simple sheet with a text field. The text field features automatic completion based on previously sent messages. Note that the From menu is not shown if only 1 identity is known (configured in accounts), but this is likely not an issue for users wanting to customize the From header.

Another new selector is scrollPageDownOrNextUnreadMessage: which can currently only be used by assigning a key using custom key bindings. The idea is to assign it to the space key to make it behave a bit differently with respect to finding the next message (standard key binding simply looks for the next message and not the next unread message).

Two algorithms now exist for the dynamic signatures system. It can be configured using the Terminal as follows:

	defaults write com.freron.MailMateSimple MmDynamicSignatureMethod -string standard

The three possible values are none (to disable it), standard (the default), and messageType. The last one bases its signature guess on whether the message is new or is a reply. This is for users who typically write an initial message with a large signature and then subsequently use a small signature.

Fixes

Revision 2491 (Sunday, September 25, 2011)

In addition to a range of fixes/improvements, this release also includes some important steps towards improving integration with other applications. Some of it is still in an experimental state, but you can read more about it further below. It might even be fun to play with.

Various fixes/improvements

Also added debug code to more easily get a log from a failing server connection. When an error window is shown with the options of “Take Account/Mailbox Offline” or “Retry” then you can hold down ⇧ to produce a log of a retry attempt. The file is saved to the Desktop with a name with the following pattern: “MailMate_server_mailbox.txt”.

Integration with other applications

Safari has menu items which can be used to easily mail pages or links. These menu items now also work for MailMate with the caveat that MailMate attaches page content (since the composer supports plain text only).

Also new is that MailMate supports the following in the Services menu: “New Email With Attachment” and “New Email With Selection”.

It is also possible to obtain a special MailMate menu item in the PDF menu of the printing dialog (this works in any application). This can be done by making an alias to MailMate in the following folder:

	~/Library/PDF Services/

After making the alias, the name of the alias can be changed to, e.g., “Mail PDF with MailMate.app”.

Finally, MailMate now also handle the following URL schemes: mid, cid, and message. Note that they can be “assigned” to MailMate by using the email application chooser in the (General) Preferences. Whether you need to do this depends on which email applications you have used in the past, e.g., “Apple Mail” only supports (and introduced) the message URL scheme.

Also added a menu item for “Copy as Link” using the message URL format. This URL scheme is an undocumented Apple feature, but this is going to work better if switching between Apple Mail and MailMate. An alternative could be the mid URL format which is standardized. This might be optional in the future.

A RESTful interface

In order to try out the following very experimental feature, you need to enable it before launching MailMate:

	defaults write com.freron.MailMate MmHTTPServerEnabled -bool YES

Now you can test it by entering the following URL in your favorite web browser:

	http://localhost:54321

The only thing displayed is a link to the following:

http://localhost:54321/messages

This should show you a list of all messages in MailMate. You can click on any message, but don’t click on junk messages since external references (images mostly) are most likely not blocked in the browser. The link to message number 1 (if it exists) would then be:

	http://localhost:54321/messages/1

You can also see the message number of any message in MailMate by enabling the “Msg ID” column in the messages outline. In the special mailbox “All Body Parts” you can also see the message number of any body part.

The default Content-Type depends on the HTTP Accept header. In a browser, text/html is likely returned for any messages or body parts of type text/*, message/rfc822, or multipart/*. Other body parts are returned as they are defined in the MIME body part headers, for example, a body part of type image/png is returned as image/png (decoded to its binary form). When using curl from the command line then the default output is text/plain for body parts where this return type is supported. This is nicely decoded canonical (utf-8 encoded) text.

The returned data can be changed by explicitly stating the accepted type(s). For example, using curl from the command line, you can retrieve a raw message as follows:

	curl -H'Accept: message/rfc822' http://localhost:54321/messages/1

Or you can retrieve the HTML formatted message used in the browser:

	curl -H'Accept: text/html' http://localhost:54321/messages/1

You can also reference header values as follows:

	http://localhost:54321/messages/1/headers/x-mailer

In this case the result would be a json array like ["MailMate r2460"] if the message had been written in the latest (registered) revision of MailMate. The following is an example of how to use a specifier to only get the MailMate part of the header:

	http://localhost:54321/messages/1/headers/x-mailer/name

You can also try the above in a browser where the following URL can be used to see a list of all headers in a message:

	http://localhost:54321/messages/1/headers

Note that message/rfc822 is also supported for the URL above.

All of this is work in progress and should be considered a “proof of concept”. The main goal is to use this as an interface for retrieving information about messages in MailMate from scripts in any language.

For now, MailMate still lacks a way to run commands on selected messages and therefore the above is not yet very useful in practice, but you are encouraged to play with it and maybe even provide some feedback.

Revision 2419 (Wednesday, August 24, 2011) — Version 1.3.1

Custom key bindings

The custom key bindings feature is now exposed in the GUI. It can be enabled in “Preferences ▸ General” and a comma-separated list of custom key bindings files can be entered. For now, only a Gmail key bindings file is distributed with MailMate. A help button in the preferences leads to a help book chapter which describes how you can create your own shortcuts, for example, to go to specific mailboxes, move messages, or to toggle IMAP keywords/tags.

Note: If you have used this feature while it was not exposed in the GUI then you still need to go to the preferences and enable it.

Hidden preferences

Over time, numerous hidden preferences have been described in the release notes. A new chapter in the help book lists all of them. Some of them are eventually going to have GUI counter parts, some will stay hidden, and some will be removed again. Look through the list to see if it contains one or more useful features for you. Feedback is welcome.

“Guessing” standard mailboxes

Introduced strategy for guessing standard mailbox names, for example, MailMate automatically figures out to use a mailbox named “Trash” for deleted messages instead of creating a new mailbox named “Deleted Messages”. This is a heuristic approach since there is no standard for getting this information from IMAP servers except for the non-standard XLIST extension used by Google (and maybe others have adopted it). This extension is also supported by MailMate.

Other changes

Some users have reported crashes when clicking on links in emails on Lion. If you experience this problem then it is very likely that you need to update the Default Folder X application. This problem also seems to not be limited to MailMate, but may occur for other applications as well.

Revision 2359 (Saturday, August 6, 2011)

Added temporary solution for adding a bcc header by default to all outgoing messages. Write the following in the Terminal if you need this:

	defaults write com.freron.MailMate MmDefaultBccHeader -string me@example.com

Added experimental prefs value MmAllMessagesFilter to make searches faster. It can be used to reduce the number of messages included in the “All Messages” mailbox. All messages are still available via the IMAP sources/mailboxes:

	defaults write com.freron.MailMate MmAllMessagesFilter -string "#date > 1 years ago"

Revision 2341 (Wednesday, August 3, 2011) — Version 1.3

With this release MailMate now officially supports Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion). Lion related changes are described in the following subsection. The release notes for this release are extensive, but you should note the subsections further below describing some new experimental features, in particular, a new flexible system for custom key bindings (providing Gmail-like keyboard shortcuts) and the first small steps toward support for OpenPGP.

New features and improvements

Two new options have been added to Preferences/General (based on frequent requests):

  1. An option to change the default behavior of double-clicking a message. It can now be set to open the message instead of searching for related messages.
  2. An option to use a bold font style for unread messages.

There is also a new hidden boolean option. When enabled, any message viewer or composer window is taken to the front when the dock icon is clicked. Normal behavior is to always open a mailbox viewer if none exists:

	defaults write com.freron.MailMate MmShowAnyViewerOnDockIconClick -bool yes

Custom keybindings

A new system is in place to provide custom key bindings for common tasks. As an example MailMate includes many of the key bindings used by Gmail. There is no GUI option yet, but this feature should be stable. To enable it, run the following from the Terminal:

	defaults write com.freron.MailMate MmCustomKeyBindingsName -string "Gmail"

The key bindings are defined in the files located in:

	MailMate.app/Contents/Resources/KeyBindings/

It is possible to create a new key bindings file and place it in:

	~/Library/Application Support/MailMate/Resources/KeyBindings/

The Gmail key bindings file can be used as a starting point for new files. It includes most of what is possible to do. Each key-combination (or series of key-combinations) can be bound to one or more actions. Each action is defined by a so-called selector.

Some selectors accept an additional argument. These are insertText:, goToMailbox:, moveToMailbox:, and toggleTag:. The goToMailbox: and moveToMailbox: selectors work both with and without an argument. Alternatively, goToMailbox: can take the unique id of any mailbox as an argument (see Mailboxes.plist) and moveToMailbox: can take one of the following as an argument:

  1. A standard mailbox name such as inbox, archive, drafts, sent, junk, and trash.
  2. A mailbox path without an account such as /Special.
  3. A full path for a mailbox within an account such as imap://you@imap.example.com/Special

The following example would bind the key g to move a message to a mailbox named Special within the account the message is currently located:

	g = ( "moveToMailbox:", "/Special");

Here is an example of using key bindings to tag messages. It also illustrates the use of nested key bindings:

	"t" = {
		"s" = ( "toggleTag:", "Special" );
	};

In this example, entering ts toggles a tag named Special. It should be possible to define a column showing the state of such a tag and it is possible to match on it when searching or creating smart mailboxes. Other than that the tag is “invisible” for now. Note that the tag is given directly to the IMAP server and thus you should use ASCII and no special characters including no use of space.

Basic experimental OpenPGP support

The first step has been taken towards support for OpenGPG. So far, there is only support for decrypting and verifying ASCII armored text parts (inlined signatures/encrypted text). It should not be considered stable, but you can help by trying it out anyways.

MailMate is currently hardcoded to use /usr/local/bin/gpg2 which you need to install if you do not already have it. The GPGTools installer is recommended (or just MacGPG2 and optionally GPG Keychain Access).

To enable this feature in MailMate you need to paste the following in the Terminal:

	defaults write com.freron.MailMate MmEnableOpenPGP -bool yes

Experimental “IMAP window”

Since MailMate is an offline email client it requires a lot of disk space if you have a large collection of emails. As an experimental feature MailMate now offers to only fetch a subset of messages based on their age. It is currently controlled with an application wide preferences value:

	defaults write com.freron.MailMate MmIMAPWindowInDays -int 365

This should limit MailMate to only fetch messages with a date within the latest year (technically, it is based on the so-called INTERNALDATE of the message on the server).

MailMate does not dynamically adapt to changes to these settings yet. It only has an effect when initially synchronizing an account. (Internally, MailMate supports controlling this window at both account and mailbox level, but this currently requires manual editing of state files.)

Any feedback on this feature is welcome, but use it with care. It is experimental.

Other changes and fixes

The following is a detailed list of all other changes since the latest public release:

When using the following debug variable, a log file is dumped to /tmp/mailmate_imap_subscriptions.log if an error occurs while fetching mailboxes to be displayed for “Edit Subscriptions”.

	defaults write com.freron.MailMate LoggingEnabled -bool YES

(It also enables logging for the Activity Viewer even when the Activity Viewer is closed.)

Revision 2204 (Monday, June 13, 2011)

Revision 2191 (Wednesday, June 8, 2011)

Improved Markdown support (still experimental)

MailMate now ships with a Markdown converter. It is named upskirt and it was originally created for GitHub. A blog post will soon be posted which describes the Markdown experiment in more detail.

An alternative composer window has also been included by default. It contains a message view to make it easy to preview the current draft by simply saving it. See the “View ▸ Layouts” menu or just hit ⌘2 in the composer.

The default CSS has been improved to work better with the output from upskirt. This includes a simple look for tables.

Other changes

Revision 2175 (Thursday, June 2, 2011)

Fixed issues with IMAP authentication methods (AUTH=PLAIN and AUTH=CRAM-MD5).

Revision 2169 (Thursday, June 2, 2011) — Version 1.2

Special note: Goggle has changed the default set of mailboxes provided via IMAP. It is strongly recommended to go into the Labels part of the Gmail web settings and make sure the following mailboxes are marked as “Show in IMAP”: Sent Mail, Drafts, Spam, and Trash.

New look for attachments

A transition has started to provide a more table-like display of non-inlined attachments with 1 row for each attachment. Note that:

Inlined PDFs are shown using the img HTML tag (thus avoiding PDF plugins). Note that you can always Quick Look attachments (⌘Y). If you never want to inline PDFs then you can do the following in the Terminal (temporary solution until a general system is in place):

defaults write com.freron.MailMate MmNeverInlinePDF -bool YES

Updated stylesheet for the messages view

As part of the attachment changes, the HTML generated has been simplified and the default CSS file has been updated/extended. If you have created a local stylesheet variant you may need to update it. If you have experience with CSS then you are encouraged to take a look at the default stylesheet:

/Applications/MailMate.app/Contents/Resources/MmMessagesWebView/stylesheet.css

You can extend the stylesheet by creating a file in the following location:

~/Library/Application Support/MailMate/Resources/MmMessagesWebView/stylesheet.css

You can see the HTML generated for a message by using “View ▸ Show HTML Source” (⌃⌘U) within MailMate.

Experimental: Markdown for writing emails

The following enables an extra option in the composer which allows you to tell MailMate that you are writing your message using Markdown:

defaults write com.freron.MailMate MmAllowMarkupLanguages -bool YES

The motivation for this idea is going to be described in a blog post, but in short, if Markdown is chosen then markup=markdown is appended to the Content-Type of the text body part of the message. This can be ignored by the receiving email application or it can be used to convert the Markdown text to HTML before displaying it. Currently, the only email client to do so is of course MailMate and currently it only works if MailMate finds markdown or upskirt in the default path (a Markdown to HTML command is currently not distributed with MailMate).

Various new features

If available the IMAP XLIST command is now used (supported by Gmail) to get the standard mailboxes. This should make MailMate work better (by default) when used with localized variants of Gmail. It may also affect your current setup if mailbox types had not been explicitly assigned.

Delivery headers

Changed the detection of delivery headers (such as X-Original-To) such that it no longer requires the existence of an identity with the same domain in an email address as found in the delivery header. If this is a problem for some users then please report it (more real life examples would be useful since this is basically a heuristic). The new behavior can currently be disabled using:

defaults write com.freron.MailMate MmAlwaysTrustDeliveryHeaders -bool NO

MailMate is now also better at guessing an appropriate from address for, e.g., mailing list messages (essentially doing the same as when replying to messages).

New debug variables

Debug variable for scripts:

defaults write com.freron.MailMate MmDebugScripts -bool YES

Debug variable for logging communication between SpamSieve and MailMate:

defaults write com.freron.MailMate DebugSpamDetection -bool YES

If you have had problems with accounts getting stuck in a “disconnected” state then you can help debug the problem doing as follows:

defaults write com.freron.MailMate MmDebugReachability -bool YES

This is going to log data which can be found in Console.app when the problem occurs.

Details, detail, details

This is an example of how you can change the font of the headers view (intermediate solution since the headers are planned to be moved to the messages view):

defaults write com.freron.MailMate MmHeadersViewFontName -string "LucidaGrande"
defaults write com.freron.MailMate MmHeadersViewFontSize -float 16

Other details:

Revision 2089 (Wednesday, May 4, 2011) — Version 1.1.2

It is now possible to save the default mailbox search conditions. Setup the search you would like by default (likely with empty text fields) and then select “Edit ▸ Find ▸ Use as Default Search”. Note that (as always) empty text field values are ignored when doing a mailbox search (as opposed to the smart mailbox editor). This is not new, but it is useful to know if setting up multiple conditions in the default search.

Also, when adding rows in the rule editor the new row is based on the row for which + was clicked (or the closest following simple row if a compound row is clicked).

Improved completion of addresses in the composer

Other changes

Fixed a bug related to the junk state of messages. When deleting a message in Junk it was wrongly marked as not junk. A bad side-effect of this is that SpamSieve was also notified that it was not junk. If you have been affected by this bug then you should consider resetting the corpus in SpamSieve. Thanks to Erik for reporting this problem (ticket #124).

Empty email address groups are now ignored when sending via SMTP. This can be used to, for example, send to “Undislosed Recipients:;” without getting an error. For convenience you can create an empty Address Book group with “Undisclosed recipients:;” as a name (or some other name, but remember to include “:;”).

Added support for the SMTP authorization method named LOGIN. This is an alternative to PLAIN which is already supported by MailMate, but some SMTP servers only support LOGIN. These methods are almost identical, but LOGIN requires more round trips to the server than PLAIN. If you have had problems with MailMate continually asking for a password for some SMTP servers then this might be a solution.

Revision 2038 (Friday, April 8, 2011) — Version 1.1.1

Autosave

When composing a message, a copy is autosaved every 30 seconds (but only if changes exist). When launching MailMate, any autosaved messages are detected and the user is asked to either discard or import. This should never result in more than 2 versions of a draft: The autosaved version and the most recently explicitly saved version.

Other changes

Revision 2003 (Friday, March 25, 2011) — Version 1.1

MailMate for everybody

Several improvements allow MailMate to work with most (if not all) IMAP servers. Send some feedback if you have an IMAP account which does not work with MailMate.

The most important improvements are:

Image blocking improved

The default in MailMate is now to always block external references, but the user has detailed control of the behavior using some new preferences (currently under General). The most important setting is “Block external references for messages in …” which allows the user to define a mailbox containing the messages for which blocking should be enabled. The default is “All Messages”, but it could be any smart mailbox, for example, a smart mailbox excluding messages which have been identified as being safe. This could be based on headers inserted by server-side spam detection software (like “X-Spam-Score” or “X-Spam-Flag”).

For convenience, the preferences also include a checkbox for “Load external references for messages marked Not Junk” (this could also be done using a smart mailbox as described above). This is especially useful when combined with a new SpamSieve option which allows you to automatically mark messages as Not Junk if they have a low spam score.

Go to the General preferences and play with these new settings and send some feedback if it somehow cannot handle your preferred use of image blocking.

Note that blocking is always enabled for messages in “Junk” or “Deleted Messages”. It is also always enabled for attached messages (occurs when using something like “Forward as Attachment…” has been used to construct an email). This allows one to safely receive forwarded spam.

When completing addresses, MailMate now looks in all Address Book sources. Technical note: This is done using a private API and therefore this feature may be removed again in future versions of MailMate. Feedback on both success and failure of this feature is welcome.

When pasting in the composer, text is preferred to images (pasting an image makes it an attachment). This was necessary since otherwise pasting text from some applications would instead result in the attachment of an image.

Also note:

Other changes

MailMate now enforces a 30-day trial period. It is measured as days of active use measured by the number of days on which messages have been sent. When the trial period has expired, you can still use MailMate, but you can only send 2 messages per launch.

Interesting minor changes:

Various (less interesting) fixes:

Revision 1951 (Saturday, March 5, 2011) — Version 1.0.2

The SpamSieve support can now be enabled in the preferences. This includes the choice of a mailbox in which SpamSieve should be used to check new messages. By default, this mailbox is the unified Inbox, but it could be any smart or real mailbox.

The handling of messages outline columns has been improved. Submailboxes automatically inherit the settings of parent mailboxes unless explicit changes are made and it is now possible to select the outline column (the column with a triangle) which is useful if the order of columns is changed.

Composer related changes:

IMAP related changes:

Other changes:

Revision 1928 (February 23, 2011) — Version 1.0.1

Reply All vs. Reply

Until now MailMate only had a single “Reply” button (and menu item). It worked as “Reply All” and the only way to make a private reply was by clearing the Cc header. This has now been improved, but even though a “Reply All” (⇧⌘R) menu item has been added, the intention is that it is not needed, because of the new behavior of “Reply”.

The feature is quite simple. When replying to a message with multiple recipients, MailMate displays a sheet to ask if one wants to reply to all or to reply to the author only. There are easy shortcuts for both alternatives (Return and Space).

Rationale: It is bad to reply to all if one really wanted to reply to a single person. But it is also bad (although not as critical) to forget to reply to all when that would have been appropriate. The solution here is to always ask when a message has multiple recipients. If you dislike this behavior, you can go to Preferences/General to make Reply work as in, for example, Apple Mail.

SpamSieve (experimental)

As you may have noticed, MailMate has no built-in junk-filtering. This is unlikely to change soon (if ever), but now there is support for SpamSieve, a shareware utility for identifying spam. It was, more or less, implemented today, so for now it is an experimental feature and can only be enabled via a hidden preference.

To enable it, copy/paste the following to the Terminal:

defaults write com.freron.MailMate SpamSieveEnabled -bool YES

Note that the preference above may be cleared by MailMate if it fails to find and launch SpamSieve.

The SpamSieve support works as follows.

You can use the “Junk/Not Junk” keywords to train SpamSieve. The SpamSieve score can be seen in a dedicated messages outline column. A planned feature is to allow the user to specify the mailbox for which SpamSieve should be used to check for spam. The default is the unified Inbox.

Memory leak in Activity Viewer

An important memory leak was found in the Activity Viewer. It was especially bad if the Activity Viewer was open during the initial synchronization of account(s).

Other

There is now a hidden option to enable alternating row colors in the messages outline:

defaults write com.freron.MailMate MmMessagesOutlineUsesAlternatingRowColors -bool YES

Minor changes and bug fixes:

Version 1.0

All of the following release notes are from the beta releases of MailMate.

Revision 1902 (Wednesday, February 16, 2011)

Revision 1891 (Sunday, February 13, 2011)

This is likely to be the last update before 1.0. As previously noted, development will continue in the 1.x.x series as it has in the 0.9.x series.

Revision 1880 (Wednesday, February 9, 2011)

As previously advertised, MailMate no longer supports local mailboxes. On startup, MailMate detects local messages in the database and offers to copy them to a folder on the desktop. After that they are deleted in MailMate.

The previous support for local mailboxes was never complete and it was mainly used as a fallback when copying a message to an IMAP mailbox failed. It is possible to emulate local mailboxes by creating offline IMAP mailboxes, but this is not recommended. In particular, it makes you more vulnerable to data loss in the event of a disk crash or another unexpected incident.

Other changes in this update:

Revision 1862 (Tuesday, February 1, 2011)

The first item in the following list is going to be important to some users since (in worst case) MailMate would crash when synchronizing the deletion of some messages.

Revision 1857 (Monday, January 31, 2011)

The following changes/fixes are based on user feedback since the release of version 0.9.10 before the weekend.

Revision 1842 (Friday, January 28, 2011) — Version 0.9.10

MailMate now supports creating, deleting, and renaming IMAP mailboxes. IMAP does not support mailbox renaming which means that in practice it is implemented by creating a new mailbox, moving the messages, and then deleting the old mailbox. The same strategy is used to support drag’n’drop move/copy of IMAP mailboxes.

Important: The support for local files will soon be removed completely. If you have any messages in mailboxes under “SOURCES/Local” then you should move them to IMAP locations as soon as possible.

New/Changed

Fixed

Revision 1793 (Wednesday, January 12, 2011) — Version 0.9.9

Note that the release notes for revision 1779 are also part of the changes since version 0.9.8. In particular, the notes on importing messages are important since they describe the plan to remove support for local messages. If you have local messages (see “Local” under SOURCES in the mailbox outline) then you should move them into an IMAP account.

This revision of MailMate includes the following changes:

Revision 1779 (Monday, January 10, 2011)

Import messages

This update includes the first steps towards removing the support for local files. The support for local files in MailMate was never intended to be more than a fallback if something failed when using an IMAP account and there was nowhere else to put it. The support was also very basic and creation/deletion/renaming of folders was not possible at all. Several users have had the need to import messages into MailMate and these were by default added to a local mailbox named “Imported”. The interface for importing has now been improved and the user is instead asked to choose an IMAP mailbox to use (as root) for the import. Progress of the import is also shown if it is not “instant”. A disk folder can also be selected for the import. Note that this has not undergone any extensive testing.

Default columns in messages outline

The messages outline has a context sensitive menu in the headers view which can be used to enable/disable columns. This menu now includes two items for handling a default set of columns. “Use as Default Columns” and “Revert to Default Columns”. The set of defaults includes the choice of threading (flat or threaded), and the current use of sorting order. The handling of column widths has also been improved.

For this to work as well as possible you should clear your current settings for the mailboxes. You can do it by running the following from the Terminal while MailMate is not running:

defaults remove com.freron.MailMate MmMailboxRelatedStates

Various additions

Various fixed bugs

Revision 1747 (Thursday, December 23, 2010) — Version 0.9.8

Version number is now 0.9.8. Note that the release notes since 0.9.7 includes revisions 1735 and 1731.

In the near future, MailMate is going out of beta with the release of version 1.0. Please report any issues you have with the current version of MailMate. Development (including new features) will continue as seen through the 0.9.x series with regularly released updates.

Changes since revision 1735:

Revision 1735 (Monday, December 20, 2010)

Revision 1731 (Friday, December 17, 2010)

Revision 1706 (Tuesday, December 7, 2010)

The previous release of MailMate was unfortunately a debug-variant which would terminate (intentionally) when dealing with buggy IMAP servers (e.g., after sending a message using Gmail).

This revision is a non-debug release as usual. It also includes the following changes:

Revision 1702 (Friday, December 3, 2010)

Revision 1658 (Sunday, November 21, 2010)

Numerous changes to the composer. Instead of the attachments view, a status bar is now shown between the headers and the text view. For now, the status bar contains the following

The support of signatures is new. A blog post is going to describe how it works in detail, but here is a brief description:

A preference option has also been added for setting a sound to be played when a message has been sent. No default sound is included. If you like, you can make a copy of the sound used by another email client (let us know if you know a royalty free “sent message sound” which can be included in MailMate as a default):

cp /Applications/Mail.app/Contents/Resources/Mail\ Sent.aiff ~/Library/Sounds/

Sounds copied to this location are also available for the counters configured in the Counters preferences pane.

Teaser: The implementation for playing the sent message sound is part of a much more general system. It can be used to perform various actions whenever a message enters or leaves the set of messages matching any query.

Other changes include:

Revision 1588 (Thursday, October 28, 2010)

Revision 1587 (Wednesday, October 27, 2010)

Revision 1582 (Saturday, October 23, 2010)

MailMate now uses $Junk and $NotJunk flags to control when resources (most often images) are allowed to be fetched from external URLs. When fetching is blocked, a special view is shown stating the reason and the number of resources blocked. Various options are available including fetching the external resources once (“Load Once”). By default MailMate is quite restrictive. External references are blocked for a message if one or more of the following is true:

Moving a message in/out of a junk mailbox automatically enables/disables the $Junk flag.

Other changes:

Revision 1565 (Friday, October 15, 2010)

Important bug in uploading of drafts and/or sent messages

A serious bug has been found and fixed in the handling of drafts. It affects messages you have edited multiple times and possibly sent using MailMate.

You may already have seen a requester on startup which requires an “OK”. If you did not see it then you are not affected by this problem.

Previous versions of MailMate did not handle drafts correctly if they were edited multiple times. The local copy of the draft would be correct, but the latest draft was not always uploaded to the IMAP server. Sending the message would work correctly (using latest draft), but again, the message in the sent messages mailbox on the IMAP server may actually be an older draft. This version of MailMate schedules verification of all drafts/sent messages on startup. If a problem is found, MailMate uploads the latest draft/sent message, but it does not delete the older draft/sent message on the server. The uploaded messages are flagged and marked as unread such that they can more easily be found. The end result will be that you may have earlier drafts of messages in your drafts mailbox or your sent messages mailbox. To find these, look for any messages related to those which are marked as both unread and flagged.

Sorry for the inconvenience!

Important bug in configuration of SMTP server

A more recent bug was fixed which affected being able to send messages at all. The configured SMTP server for new accounts were simply not saved. For existing accounts this problem is fixed by creating the SMTP configuration when it is needed, but some settings might have been lost, in particular, whether or not to require SSL. In most cases it should work as expected, i.e., MailMate is going to send any drafts currently scheduled for submission. Note that you can enable the State column in the messages outline (for the Drafts mailbox) in order to see the state of Drafts.

Other changes include:

Revision 1532 (Tuesday, October 5, 2010)

Distortion has been improved in order to a bit more useful in practice, e.g., clicking on various search links should actually still work now.

Various problems in the text view of the composer have been fixed. It works better on Snow Leopard now and increase/decrease quoting level works more reliably now. In particular, the current selection is maintained correctly.

An important crash bug was fixed. It was triggered by mailbox names containing one or more single quotes. Also:

Revision 1504 (Tuesday, September 28, 2010)

MailMate performs a series of checks before sending a message. Simple checks for non-empty subject line and message content have now been extended with more advanced checks:

Message distortion is a new and rather odd, but useful, feature. It can be enabled/disabled using the “View ▸ Distortion Mode” menu item. In distortion mode, the words in most headers and message bodies are replaced with words from lorem ipsum. Word length and capitalization is preserved, but there is no way to get back to the original text. Therefore it can be used to hide the real content of messages. This is useful for creating screenshot examples for bug reports or feature requests without revealing personal information. Note that mailbox names and HTML messages are currently not distorted.

Update: The “no way to get back to the original” is probably true in most cases, but note that one can probably deduce some information based on word length frequencies or similar methods. Also, numbers/amounts are not distorted.

Other changes include:

A standalone test-program has been created (not included) which can be used to stress-test multiple connections to the same IMAP account. Numerous bugs have been found and fixed using this test-program, including

Various other fixes:

Revision 1465 (Thursday, September 9, 2010)

Two experimental features have been added which can be enabled by quitting MailMate and then use the defaults command in a Terminal.

When possible prefer plain text over html:

defaults write com.freron.MailMate MmPreferPlainText -bool YES

Minimum font size used in the message viewer (for HTML messages):

defaults write com.freron.MailMate MmMessagesWebViewMinimumFontSize -integer 9

New:

Other:

Revision 1415 (Monday, August 23, 2010)

Revision 1401 (Friday, August 20, 2010)

Until now, a hidden feature of MailMate was that 4 counters could be configured in the dock icon. This feature is now exposed via a new preferences pane named Counters. It has some noteworthy features:

By default, two counters are displayed in the dock. The unread count of the Inbox and the number of unreplied messages in the Inbox (flagged, but not answered messages).

The color selection of the preferences pane is not enabled yet. It may help to complain or you can edit the preferences file directly (look for MmCounters).

Other changes:

Revision 1365 (Saturday, August 7, 2010)

Revision 1331 (Friday, July 16, 2010)

Revision 1314 (Saturday, July 10, 2010)

Revision 1310 (Wednesday, July 7, 2010)

Revision 1281 (Friday, June 18, 2010)

Revision 1263 (Friday, June 4, 2010)

Revision 1192 (Monday, April 19, 2010)

Important: Also note the changes described below for revision 1182 which was never released on its own.

Revision 1182 (Thursday, April 15, 2010)

Due to some of the changes described below, it is recommended (but not strictly necessary) to remove the following file after quitting MailMate:

~/Library/Application Support/MailMate/Mailboxes.plist

You should copy the file if you want to copy/paste any existing custom mailboxes to the new Mailboxes.plist file generated by MailMate (make sure to quit MailMate before editing the file).

Noteworthy changes:

Noteworthy bugs fixed:

Revision 1141 (Thursday, March 18, 2010)

Revision 1120 (Sunday, March 7, 2010)

Revision 1113 (Saturday, March 6, 2010)

Revision 1103 (Monday, March 1, 2010)

Most important changes to note:

The LSUB command for IMAP only returns subscribed mailboxes. This may be a problem for some existing IMAP accounts since MailMate does not yet have an interface for changing subscriptions. Especially if these mailboxes have been created by previous versions of MailMate which failed to automatically subscribe new mailboxes.

Other changes:

Revision 1102 (Monday, March 1, 2010)

Most important changes to note:

The LSUB command for IMAP only returns subscribed mailboxes. This may be a problem for some existing IMAP accounts since MailMate does not yet have an interface for changing subscriptions. Especially if these mailboxes have been created by previous versions of MailMate which failed to automatically subscribe new mailboxes.

Other changes:

Revision 1053 (Friday, February 12, 2010)