need help finding a good email client

I’ve been using Thunderbird for years, but needed a better spam solution, and some searching led me to SpamSieve.

It appears that SpamSieve uses a very sensible combination of feature detection and Baysian filtering, which is exactly what I want. And after using it for a couple of weeks, I think it’s going to do a fine job identifying the spam.

But it’s not compatible with Thunderbird, which frankly has been annoying me anyway, so I tried Postbox (the commercial Thunderbird derivative that is compatible with SpamSieve), but after using that for a few weeks too, I’m not very satisfied. I find it buggy (doesn’t actually move junk to the folder specified in the prefs, doesn’t remember my message-list settings between runs, sometimes shows an empty bogus message at the end of the message list), and cumbersome (for example, having to set the junk mail settings in three different places when you have two accounts).

So, since everybody here reads mail on a Mac and uses SpamSieve, I’m hoping somebody can suggest a better alternative.

Must-have features:

  1. SpamSieve compatibility (obviously).
  2. Spam can be routed automatically to a separate folder (what’s supposed to work, but doesn’t, in Thunderbird and Postbox).
  3. A send delay. For example, when I hit “Send”, it should go into a queue where it sits for 5 minutes or so before actually being sent, so when I realize I have something to add or amend, I can do so. (Thunderbird and Postbox don’t have this built in, but support a “Send Later” plug-in that accomplishes this, though somewhat awkwardly.)
  4. Support for two different email accounts, each with a different signature.
  5. Decent performance when handling 10s of thousands of stored messages (and many hundreds of messages per day).

Nice-to-have would be a feature where email “expires” after a certain amount of time, and is then moved or deleted according to the folder settings. For example, email in my Inbox more than a week goes to the Archive folder; email in the Junk folder more than a couple weeks gets deleted.

So. Any suggestion on an email client that meets these requirements? (I’m quite happy to pay for such an important app if it doesn’t suck.)

Thanks,

  • Joe

P.S. And a related question: if I end up having to write one myself, how would I interface with SpamSieve? Where are the APIs documented?

I think MailMate does. This page tells how to set the sending delay.

You can just open SpamSieve’s scripting dictionary in Script Editor or Script Debugger.