[MlMt] Evaluation results

[Andreas Jung]

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On 19 May 2015, at 9:53, Benny Kjær Nielsen wrote:


- "default columns" do not work as expect, reverting the default columns
for a folder is not persisted properly

Yes, this does not work well for certain standard folder types (sent, junk, ...). Unfortunately, improving this most likely requires a fundamental redesign of how it works and I cannot promise that'll happen soon.


No, it does not work _at all_ with standard folder. I apply "Revert to default columns" on a folder, switch to a different folder and back and the column layout again is not the default columns layout.


- being unable to remove an imap folder containing message without prior
removing all mails manually (major usability pain in the ass)

As I stated in [the ticket](https://freron.lighthouseapp.com/projects/58672/tickets/1157-unable-to-delete-imap-folders#ticket-1157-1) I am willing to prioritize this if it's very important to you. I don't see this as a “major usability pain in the ass” since I don't think a lot of users frequently delete IMAP mailboxes containing emails. As also stated in the ticket, it's not a quick fix, because MailMate has multiple checks to ensure that non-empty IMAP mailboxes are never deleted.

It is a major pain when you need to clean up your inboxes or deal with lots of mailboxes that you are using for a short amount of time. And as said: adding an explicit user confirmation is unlikely a big warning.


- incomplete and half-baked implementation of the "mailboxes" tree...being
unable to arrange mailboxes as needed using drag & drop

There is certainly potential for improvement in this area.

It's just half-baked and it is far away from being helpful for organizing my favorite email folders and for accessing them fast.


- fragile rule engine...hard to debug why email rules work sometimes and sometimes
not

For debugging, I recommend creating a smart mailbox with the same conditions as used by the rule. That should make it easy to see what is matched and what is not matched.

Easy rules like matching a single From: address sometimes works and sometimes it does not. The behavior
is often odd and unpredictable. This makes working with Mailmate just unreliable.



What is my point?

Mailmate is not a bad application and I appreciate that the maintainer
cares more about productivity and power-user features than implementing
useless features that nobody needs. However Mailmate has a serious
quality assurance problem. A lot of features are only half implemented
and not stable or usable. What is the point? Mailmate costs 45 EURO
compared to 15 EUR for Postbox compared to nothing for Mail.app.

Well, you already stated what your problem with Postbox is. I wrote this (and many other replies) for free. Getting the same number of responses from Postbox support would have cost you a fortune ;-) As an added bonus, I've spent time ignoring the use of words such as “ass”, “stupid”, and “suck”. That's not as easy as one might think.

(Oh, and good luck getting feedback replies from Apple.)

I guess feedback should be a two-way street: I don't know about other developers, but I think you would get both more and better responses by toning down your language a bit. I'm certainly not motivated by being told how much this or that suck. I'm perfectly aware of all the bugs and short-comings of MailMate. I am, by far, its worst critic and I have no idea why *anyone* would want to use MailMate. That is also why I continue to work on MailMate. I want it to be good enough to deserve *my own* praise.

The conclusion is: all mail applications for Mac suck in their own special
way - only the price differs.

I really don't know how to respond to that. If you are in a situation where you need a discount then let me know. I'm not going to lower the price in general. And don't get me wrong. If I was working on MailMate for the money then I would be more stupid than the shortcomings of MailMate are.



I don't care about a discount and I don't care about 50 EUR. I care about a working work environment and
I take the freedom to complain about software that has obvious bugs. I am software developer myself and I am annoyed to see so many little obvious and open issues in your software in a 1.9 release. I have not seen this in any other Mac software so far. Either some features are not very well thought or just badly implement
or just to generic in order to make it right (the rules engine gives me exactly this feeling).

-aj
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