If you need a fast, accurate way to pore through reams of e-mails, PowerMail’s superb searching could be a life-saver. PowerMail’s flexible, lightning-fast search is its biggest strength. The main window only lets you search the From, To, or Subject fields, not the entire message body. However, the search box in PowerMail’s main window doesn’t work as well as the one accessible via its Find command. PowerMail messages are also thoughtfully available for Spotlight searches performed in the Finder. (In contrast, Apple Mail took 5 seconds to provide full results for a similar search in a local folder with less than 800 messages.) FoxTrot supports wildcard searching with asterisks, unlike Apple Mail’s Spotlight-powered search. In my tests, the program found a specific and accurate set of messages in less than a second, even in a 10,000-plus-message mailbox accessed over an IMAP connection. PowerMail’s excellent search features, which are based on CTM’s FoxTrot technology, are a definite high point. New filters are easy to set up, and they worked well at routing messages to their intended destinations. PowerMail’s manual offers helpful suggestions of criteria to watch for in establishing filters. You can add extra spam protection by creating custom filters to watch for offending words or headers. In practice, neither measure kept spam messages out of my inbox. PowerMail lacks the built-in spam filters Apple Mail and other rivals offer, which can learn to recognize and block most junk mail its only built-in, automatic defenses against spam consist of a filter to block all incoming HTML messages by default, and the ability to filter messages according to flags that might be set by spam-blocking software on the user’s mail server. PowerMail does offer flawless spam-blocking-but only if you’re using C-Command’s outstandingĪntiSpam X5 ($50), or another spam-blocking utility (CTM offers a bundle deal with SpamSieve for a discounted price). I was also tripped up by PowerMail’s use of the command-delete keyboard shortcut to trash messages according to the developers, it’s designed to prevent accidental deletions. The programmers say they are following Finder conventions, but are considering letting users toggle this feature in the forthcoming PowerMail 6. I was particularly frustrated by PowerMail’s insistence that I click on the name of a mail message or mailbox to open it, rather than clicking anywhere in that element’s row, as other mail programs allow. PowerMail’s interface feels clunky and outdated, full of frustrating quirks.
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