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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