[MlMt] Future plans?

[Benny Kjær Nielsen]

Hi,

sorry about the late and long response. I've answered in more detail 
than I intended to initially :-)

Note: The last half of this reply is of general interest to all users of 
MailMate.

On 23 May 2013, at 23:29, CSS wrote:

> [...]
>
> That said, I do currently deal with three rather large mail accounts, 
> plus some additional accounts used for archives.  I think I basically 
> want to maintain immediate access to more mail than MailMate is 
> designed for due to the "flat" message store.  On my older MBP it's 
> most obvious - everything has a bit of a lag, particular paging 
> through or deleting messages; it's just enough lag to make me second 
> guess whether I deleted the right thing. :)

It is hard to say if there is something special in your setup that makes 
this worse than it is for others. MailMate loads various things lazily 
which means that the first few minutes you might have small delays when 
something new is needed, but after that it should be relatively fast.

Are you low on memory? Memory usage is one of the aspects of MailMate 
which I would like to improve for large message stores.

Any pattern to the behavior? Do you see it in every mailbox at any time 
or is it more complicated than that?

> I understand that as it stands, MailMate is not made for my usage 
> scenario (giant mailboxes, and less-than-modern hardware), but is 
> there anything to look forward to in the next year or two that might 
> be of interest to someone like me who's eager to ditch Mail.app?  I 
> recall reading something in the archives that there may be a time in 
> the future when MM gets a major rewrite to make handling 50K+ messages 
> practical.  Are we anywhere near that time?

Some users claim to use MailMate with 500K messages, but I think that 
requires pretty powerful hardware. I think 50-100K messages should work 
pretty well.

I would like to work on optimizations, but I have (at least) two 
features which I have promised myself to implement first. This is going 
to get close to being a public roadmap which I generally do not do, 
because it often leads to disappointment. In other words, don't take 
this as a promise of any feature being implemented before any deadline.

In my mind, the major missing features in MailMate are:

* Rules (which can be added to any mailbox with actions like “move 
message”, “tag”, “run script”, etc.)
* Commands (essentially scripts executed at certain events including 
keyboard shortcuts)

The first one is what I'm currently working on and the other one has 
been partly implemented for a long time, but it still needs some work. 
I, arrogantly, expect “Commands” to be the mother of all features in 
MailMate. We'll see, but at least the features above are going to make 
MailMate what I had originally planned for version 1.0 :-)

> Regardless, I think MM is a fantastic mail client and I'll recommend 
> it to anyone who will listen.

Thanks!

> As more people move to webmail and social media for messaging, it 
> seems like the market for "power user" MUAs is decreasing.

Well, “power users” are probably the last ones moving away from 
desktop email clients, but you do have a point. The number of potential 
users of a desktop email client is decreasing.

This is how I see it: Desktops/laptops are going back to primarily being 
tools for professionals. As this happens the software landscape is also 
going to change. Naturally, I cannot predict what happens in the future 
(although I just did), but for an application like MailMate to survive 
then part of the change has to be that the price on third party software 
goes up. My guess is there is going to be no more $10 third party email 
clients. The big question is whether or not there is going to be any 
third party email clients at all (other than the free ones).

> I was truly disappointed that my use case didn't fit MM, as I was very 
> eager to make it my primary mail
> client - everything else about it is just about perfect.

Write me an email if you need help to prolong your trial period.

-- 
Benny
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