Dear PowerMail users,
We have been carefully pondering the consequences on some of your following
Apple's drop of POP3 support in iCloud. We certainly are MobileMe users and
understand the issue.
Let me start with the positioning statement for PowerMail:
"An excellent POP3 mail client with best-of-class FoxTrot search technology,
sprinkled with a lightweight IMAP4 implementation."
We are very much of the persuasion that local storage of personal data is and
will remain a relevant concept, be it for privacy reasons (do you want allow a
cloud-hosting company, state or hacker to be a single password away from your
entire data life ?) or for security reasons - being able to manage what is and
should remain locally searchable at any time - uptime, downtime, anytime) is
crucial to many of us.
The lightweight IMAP implementation we have in PowerMail was designed as such;
one of its visible limitations is connecting to one account at a time, but was
also intended to offer it as an occasional alternative to logging into a POP3
account if needed - when on an expensive data link such as GSM data, for
deleting an oddly formed single message from the server, and so on.
Over the years it is been apparent that we care greatly for PowerMail and
strive to maintain PowerMail in working order. I have two pieces of news on
this topic: version 6.1.1b2 will soon be ready for testing, it fixes a couple
of 10.7.3 squawks and has successfully passed quick-look testing on the Mac OS
X 10.8 Mountain Lion developer seed - so if Apple doesn't break anything on us,
PowerMail shall do fine on the next Mac OS X.
On the topic of modifying the code so as to implement POP-over-IMAP, I'm very
grateful that Peter Lovell brought this up because this was precisely our
thinking when the iCloud message thread started.
However, the implementation hurdles are higher than expected. The least painful
route would be to modify the current IMAP code and break its current behavior
(downside: alienates those who use IMAP as it is), but this *would* require
very substantial work. Extending the user interface to enable a third option
besides POP3 and IMAP would be a truly considerable project, as it would also
require database work for settings et. al.
So the Lotto would seem like a plausible financing scenario for such a project
;-) We are not players, but hope that some of you are.
More seriously, I see four avenues for users to choose from:
- If you wish to drop PowerMail, we can understand that although we do think
there are mitigation scenarios. Read on.
- Migrating to another hosting provider than iCloud, one that respects your
needs for POP3, is another avenue. This is the one we are choosing internally
with auto-forwarding setup in MobileMe for legacy mac.com/me.com email
addresses to a server that we run in-house. Of course it could be on another
provider as weel,
- In the meantime - and possibly in the long run, a parallel use of PowerMail
and Apple Mail on the Mac/iPad/iPhone accessing our iCloud addresses does work
nicely. Apple Mail is indexable with FoxTrot Personal Search or Professional
Search, so we get much of the searching back
- Finally, using PowerMail's lightweight IMAP4, you could nevertheless achieve
with a little manual work what Peter Lovell was suggesting (POP3 over IMAP):
- setup the account as IMAP
- Once connected, copy all remote messages waiting to a local folder
(with a name such as "Local INBOX) and then delete them from the IMAP4 server
- Reply and process messages in the Local INBOX as if it had come over
POP3; apply filters to them with the contextual menu.
We hope these avenues, while imperfect, will help you continue use PowerMail
for its strengths.
Kind regards,
jean michel/ctm qa
