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review: gyazmail
2010/04/06 08:48
| reviews
GyazMail is a commercial ($18.00 for single-user license), Cocoa-based mail client for OS X published by GyazSquare.
Setup and Configuration
A mail expert would find it easy to set up, although not everyone might. The user must visit at least two panes in Preferences: Accounts to get mail working, and the Receiving tab in particular contains a number of esoteric settings that probably should be hiding behind an "Advanced..." button.
Probably the most unusual thing about GyazMail, and the first thing that I found frustrating, is its lack of HTML composition - when creating a new email message, you can only do so in plain text. No font selection, styles, colors, or the like are possible. The reason I was confused at first is that I assumed there was a setting somewhere to enable rich text formatting of some kind or another, and I just missed where it was. Alas, there is no support for it at all, although GyazMail does a good job of displaying messages that are received which have fancy markup, images, and links.
After a while I didn't really miss it, but I don't typically embellish my messages with much in the way of bold, green text on yellow backgrounds or the like. Someone used to being able to just italicize or bold a selection of text, though, might find this lack more limiting, and quite frankly, it's just odd in a mail client meant for use in today's world. Support for markup in composition is promised for version 2, but no schedule for that version's release is available.
Other, less common features that are currently not included are built-in encryption and digital signature support, support for Spotlight, LDAP address books, and NNTP newsgroups. The latter two are probably only useful for a tiny percentage of email users today, but digital signatures and full message encryption are likely to become more and more common—and eventually the default—for most messaging on the internet. Today, though, I view inclusion of support for encryption in email clients as a nice plus, but don't take away any points for the lack of it.
Day to Day
Two other annoyances with GyazMail surfaced after a few days of testing. One is that the toolbar buttons for Reply, Reply to All, and Forward are confusingly similar:
Setup and Configuration
A mail expert would find it easy to set up, although not everyone might. The user must visit at least two panes in Preferences: Accounts to get mail working, and the Receiving tab in particular contains a number of esoteric settings that probably should be hiding behind an "Advanced..." button.
The main dialog includes thoughtful "Required" labels for fields that must be filled in.
Required settings for many, if not most, email servers are here, plus additional
caching and timeout values that many, if not most, email users can ignore.
Probably the most unusual thing about GyazMail, and the first thing that I found frustrating, is its lack of HTML composition - when creating a new email message, you can only do so in plain text. No font selection, styles, colors, or the like are possible. The reason I was confused at first is that I assumed there was a setting somewhere to enable rich text formatting of some kind or another, and I just missed where it was. Alas, there is no support for it at all, although GyazMail does a good job of displaying messages that are received which have fancy markup, images, and links.
After a while I didn't really miss it, but I don't typically embellish my messages with much in the way of bold, green text on yellow backgrounds or the like. Someone used to being able to just italicize or bold a selection of text, though, might find this lack more limiting, and quite frankly, it's just odd in a mail client meant for use in today's world. Support for markup in composition is promised for version 2, but no schedule for that version's release is available.
Other, less common features that are currently not included are built-in encryption and digital signature support, support for Spotlight, LDAP address books, and NNTP newsgroups. The latter two are probably only useful for a tiny percentage of email users today, but digital signatures and full message encryption are likely to become more and more common—and eventually the default—for most messaging on the internet. Today, though, I view inclusion of support for encryption in email clients as a nice plus, but don't take away any points for the lack of it.
Day to Day
Two other annoyances with GyazMail surfaced after a few days of testing. One is that the toolbar buttons for Reply, Reply to All, and Forward are confusingly similar:
Quick - which is which?
The default toolbar includes text labels which help in identification, but I had trouble picking them out at first since one of the first things I tend to do with most applications is switch to a small icon size and turn off text labels for the toolbars. The more highly stylized an icon becomes, the more attractive it may be, but the harder it becomes to identify its purpose. By way of example, here is my toolbar for GyazMail, customized a bit to include functions I use frequently:
How many of these functions can you identify by icon alone?
The last thing to mention about GyazMail is that it sometimes exhibited poor IMAP performance, particularly when synchronizing large folders it hadn't seen before. For example, it took almost twice as long to synchronize my Archive folder as did Apple's Mail. For the most part, its performance is good.
Overall Score: 7 out of a possible 10
I could live with GyazMail as my everyday client, I think. There are a few odd things about it, for sure, but in general it does what it should, in most cases the way it should, and produces few problems. If the promised features for version 2.0 make it in, and 2.0 is released at some point, it'll be worth another look.
It lost points for lack of HTML or other markup composition, confusing and occasionally redundant option dialogs, and lack of Spotlight integration.
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