4 Ways PowerMail Is More Powerful Than Apple Mail

If there’s truly a killer application for Mac and PC users, it’s email. Love it or hate, we spend a lot of time reading and sending email. Years of email. Some of my email dates back to the middle of the last decade, at the end of the last century.

Sorry, as much as I love my Mac and all things Apple, I’m still searching for powerful email. Why? Because I have so much email. How many ways can your Mac do email? Let me count the ways. All but a handful of Mac email apps are for everyday users. In other words, not so much power.

Mail Choices

For all the time we spend in email on our Macs, the number of popular choices for email applications mostly fit on one hand (and one more finger if you include Apple’s Mail).

There’s Microsoft’s Entourage, which becomes Outlook next year. Add to that Mozilla’s Thunderbird. There’s an offshoot called Postbox. Both run on Mac and PC. Bare Bones’ Mailsmith is now free. And Eudora has become the Penelope Project, another offshoot of Thunderbird.

Regardless of how you cook it, the pickings are slim. There are far more Mac browsers on the market than email applications.

PowerMail

Aswe spend so much of our online time digging through email, one thing becomes apparent. The email we save continues to grow. That means archiving, storing, saving, and searching. PowerMail is an option whose time has come.

A quick look at the PowerMail home page will tell say one thing—This is made by geeky folks. That it is.

Threading

If there’s a hallmark to PowerMail, it’s speed. PM is quick to dig through tons of email and present messages in a nice, tidy Finder-like list.

Most of us read email threads. You respond to an email that comes in, goes out, comes back in with an update, the update is responded to by others on the C.C. list, and the next thing you know the whole series of messages is very complex.

PowerMail threads those messages together in a stack so it’s easier to follow who said what to whom.

Import Export

Moving from email application to another is a scary proposition. We’re moving from one known entity to an unknown entity. PowerMail makes the transition easier.

You’re a couple of clicks away from importing Apple’s Mail database or Thunderbird’s mail database. Likewise, two clicks and exporting is done, too. Your email is safe wherever you go.

Quick Look

If you like Apple’s Quick Look Finder feature in OS X, you’ll like the implementation in PowerMail.

You’re a spacebar away from any email selection, including attachments, text, graphics, and more. Just like in the Finder’s Quick Look.

Search Me Elmo

Finding email in a large archive of messages is usually quick in any Mac email application. It’s unusually fast in PowerMail, with far more filtering capabilities.

This is especially handy if you have tens of thousands of email messages that date back many years. The makers of PowerMail also have a utility called FoxTrot Search. Think of it as a network based Spotlight search capability, especially for professionals who must dig through mountains of email messages.

More To Love

I’m not in love with PowerMail, but I respect what it does. It’s fast, especially if your email requirements are corporate or just messages in the tens of thousands that must be archived and searched regularly.

There’s an option to index and search through HTML email parts (they’re usually very messy). Assuming your email is a mountain, PowerMail can index in the background. The email and archive clean up assistant can split up huge database of email messages into more manageable archives.

PowerMail is a worthy contender for power email users, but not for the faint of heart. The archiving, filtering, indexing, and layout can seem intimidating. But it churns through email in a hurry, both in the import and export, as well as during search.

It’s just a shame there are so few email choices available for Mac users.