Mailsmith Filters: Big disappointment

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
June 25th, 2003 • 10:00 pm

I can hardly believe it, but I have just found out that Mailsmith’s “integration” of Mac OS X’s Address Book is only skin-deep and that it is impossible to use groups created in Address Book in the definition of filter criteria in Mailsmith.

For example, I have a GROUP called “Friends” in my Address Book which includes all personal friends. I like all the email coming from my personal friends to SHOW up in a specific colour in my incoming mail box and to trigger a particular notification sound clip. In Mac OS X’s Mail, I have a filter (“rule”) where the only criterion (“condition”) is “Sender is member of GROUP ‘Friends’ “. If the condition is met, the rule colours the message in a specific colour and Mail plays the sound clip.

I cannot do this in Mailsmith! In ORDER to achieve the same effect, I need to create a filter with one criterion (condition) for each Address Book entry in my group, with a logical OR between the conditions. If I have 20 friends in this group, I have to have 20 criteria! Each time I add a new friend to my “Friends” GROUP in my Address Book, I also have to add a new criterion to my filter in Mailsmith!

This cannot be true. How could Bare Bones miss such an obvious thing?

I am afraid that this alone is enough to make me give up on trying to use Mailsmith as my email program. It’s too bad, because I really liked the improved performance, and I am really attracted to the power provided by Mailsmith’s filters otherwise. But this is just a glaring omission. When Bare Bones announced that they were going to support Mac OS X’s Address Book in Mailsmith 2.0, I was certain that this included the ability to use Address Book groups in Mailsmith’s filters. Not so, I am afraid.

I guess I’ll stick with Mail…


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