Hi Angus,

I had purchased MailMate a few months ago. Many of the features of this interesting application are accessible but some - maybe important to some, certainly to me - are still inaccessible to voiceover. Let me say a few things about my experience with MailMate.

I have a few iMAP accounts, and setting them up was rather easy. Only with iCloud I had problems setting the right outgoing smpt. I found that info on the internet but I can't remember now what it is supposed to be. once I've set it up though, it works fine.

All the mailboxes are arranged in a table. The difference between Apple Mail and MailMate here is that you cannot navigate up and down the column containing names of your mailboxes using first letters of the names but you have to use vo+up/downarrows to move through the mailbox list. The only other solution is to use MailMate specific shortcut combination which is command+t which opens a text box where you can type in the name of the mailbox you want to jump to and you have to type a few first letters of the name and press enter in order to be placed there. This is a bit long-winded.

Also, Once you find your mailbox, you have to vo+right arrow to get to the message list. Here again, you have to interact with the list to read the info about each message. Unfortunately, Voiceover does not report the status of the message nor will it report whether a message has an attachment. This is a real drawback to me. I had reported it to the developer, and he sort of took it on board to look at it but I rather had a feeling that he was not going to make his priority.

When you open a message, it opens up as a html page. You need to navigate it as it were a Safari page. Interestingly, in MailMate the internal page links actually work, so when you have for instance a digest of messages like the ones you get from macvisionaries, you can actually hit the enter key on the link which is the thread and it will put you there straight away. This is a good feature, and I use MailMate now mostly to read digest messages because of this feature.

Much to my amazement, although MailMate has under the file menu the usual choices like save, save as etc, and each is associated with a shortcut key combination, these commands don't work. Again I reported it to the developer, and he said they were future developments. No time indication was given. The thing is that sighted users use drag and drop to save their messages but I can't use it this way so for me it's an important drawback as I like to save some of my messages into documents.

You reply to a message in the usual way but again, I hit a problem with aliases because although they are on the screen somewhere they are not yet available to voiceover. Again I reported it and the only advice I got from the developer is to use the shortcut key combination command+control+i. This actually works and opens the list of your aliases and account names from which you wish to reply. I reported the inaccessibility of these elements to the developer but I am not very optimistic how sympathetic he was.

Another thing is, there is no reporting of how many unread messages you have in each mailbox as you vo+up and down arrow through the list of the boxes. The count does appear on the screen to the left of the toolbar but you actually have to vo+left arrow to read this info and it takes far too long to do so.

Overall, MailMate is usable with Voiceover but is significantly inferior to apple mail with Voiceover in my opinion. It is quite expensive on top of that, I think I paid around £35. That's an expensive application so I was a bit disappointed. I only hope that one day the developer will improve it for Voiceover users. One qualification here,, I must admit that I haven't played with MailMate much of late. Maybe I could have become more familiar with it by using it more often but the inaccessibility issues that are crucial to me have put me off. In my mind, I've consigned the purchase of MailMate to the category of the misjudged purchases but then again that's how we sometimes learn.

I also have a Fast Mail account. and use it with apple Mail client. The web version is fine to set up apart from a couple of radio buttons which voiceover doesn't read. I had reported them so maybe one day they will be provided with the proper textual tags. I found using the web version to read and manage and send messages problematic. But from within Apple mail, there's no problem Remember though that fast mail doesn't give you plenty of storage space.Even the paid subscriptions give you relatively little storage.

Hope this will help.


Andrew

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