[MlMt] What version of MailMate are you running?

[John Cooper]

Charlie Clark wrote (at 5:35 AM on Tuesday, November 19, 2024):

> I think you've mischaracterised what Benny has done.…You must realise, that as a commercial product, he has to be sure that an official release really is rock solid; I can think of quite a few large software companies that could learn from this.

Eager as we understandably are to shield the author of a beloved software product from even the gentlest implied criticism, I think everyone can agree that Benny’s versioning strategy is eccentric, to say the least. The MailMate 1.14 I’m using now (let’s leave the build numbers to the geeks) has undergone countless major improvements and rewrites since the release of MailMate 1.0 over 13 (!) years ago. There is no reason to wait for well over a decade of continual improvement to upgrade a version number by a single digit, even if the UI has not been completely rethought. (I would argue that there have been plenty of significant changes to the interface as well.) This situation confuses new users. I suspect it’s also deprived Benny of a good deal of new-user revenue, as potential users see the low version number and interpret it to mean that the program has not undergone the significant updates that it has.

For all this time, I’ve generally been using MailMate’s latest development build, lagging no more than a couple of weeks behind, and the issues (bugs) I’ve encountered have been vanishingly few.  I can think of no other software company small or large that is so conservative in its versioning. Benny’s development versions are easily as robust as most companies’ beta versions. Benny’s betas are analogous to official releases. There is no bug-free software product. Users should feel confident in using more recent builds than the release level would indicate.

Devyn Osborne wrote:

> Are there worthwhile fixes or new features past 1.14 (5937)? Is there a particularly stable version that people are using?

In MailMate, you can select Help > Release Notes to see a list of all changes to builds released since February 23, 2011. The significant changes since the release of build 5937 are too many to list.