From: "the PowerMail folks" (info@ctmdev.com)
Subject: [ANN] PowerMail 3.0b1 for Mac now available

Hello,

A quick note to inform the readers of MacTech and NetProfessional that a
public beta release of our new Macintosh e-mail application, PowerMail
3.0b1, is now available. It is based on the PowerMail Engine, a robust,
cross-platform foundation encapsulating over eight years of e-mail and
directory experience at CTM Development.
What are the long-term objectives of PowerMail ?

- Offer a lean, mean and efficient alternative e-mail client for people who
care about e-mail
- Focus on offering a state-of-the-art Macintosh user-experience
- Contribute to the on-going diversity of mail clients on the Mac
- Evolve our new code foundation on a regular basis to meet user needs more
quickly
- Recognize the value in our user's data and offer reliable storage,
high-speed indexing and the ability to export to a variety of standard
formats
- Excel in supporting multi-lingual, word-wide mail users

Thank you for helping spread the news: there are still a few developers of
e-mail clients left outside of Microsoft ! Do let me know if I can help in
any way (a review copy for instance).

Best regards,

Maite Lamagat (maite@ctmdev.com)
on behalf of the PowerMail development team

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[1] PowerMail 3.0 public beta 1 now available

We are pleased to announce the availability of PowerMail 3.0 public beta 1,
following our announcement at MacWorld Expo/San Francisco last week. This
evaluation version, which expires on February 12th, 2000, is downloadable
from:

http://powermail.simplenet.com/pm3_beta.bin (2033k) or
http://powermail.simplenet.com/pm3_beta.hqx (2760k)

as well as from the public folder on the iDisk for user "powermail" .

Additional download sites from our download page at:

http://www.ctmdev.com/download.shtml

Please note that public beta version are only available in English;
Japanese, French and Swedish versions will come after the final English
release.

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[2] What's new in PowerMail 3

General application

1. Complete application rewrite from the ground up - more than
95% of the code is new
2. Up to 400% faster in common operations such as sending or
saving with indexing turned on, launching, etc...
3. Carbonized mail engine ready for Mac OS X pre-emptive
multitasking
4. Entirely based on Unicode, requiring fewer text encoding
conversions
5. Full Mac OS 9/X Appearance manager support with proportional
scrollbars, sounds and on-the fly theme switching
6. Customizable views for each list including column presence,
order, sort direction, width
7. Display of relative dates (Today, Yesterday, November 3rd...)
8. Ability to get rid of mail preview pane or get rid of browser
altogether and replace it with folder and mail list windows.
9. Contextual menus in folder pane, list views, text body,
address book
10. AppleEvent-based spell-checking allows selection of
spell-checker from various vendors, in several languages
11. No installer required on most systems - it's double-click and
run
12. "View only" floating window allows narrowing down of a
particular list view in RAM
13. Ability to override several account's SMTP servers with a
master SMTP account with log-in, which circumvents
relay-restrict problems.
14. Direct-manipulation rename of list items such as folders and
address book entries
15. Horizontal or vertical button toolbar
16. Import of Claris Emailer 2 mail databases over AppleEvents as
well as address books (requires Claris Emailer 2.0v3)
17. Full migration of PowerMail 2.x mail databases, address
books, filters, signatures and other settings.

Mail features

1. Multi-threaded sending and fetching from pop accounts
minimizes on-line connection time.
2. Batch sending per SMTP server
3. Flexible options for deleting messages from server: After
fetching, after n days, when moving to local mail trash,
immediately
4. Better reading features allow filing messages within mail
view
5. Multiple signature database with Random signature option
6. List whether a message has been replied to, forwarded or
redirected
7. Several speed-mail viewing features (including single-click
"Delete and view next", mouse free reading, etc...)
8. Up to 10 color labels with command-key assignment
9. Advanced, powerful filtering with up to 16 conditions and 16
actions per filter
10. Fully modeless dialog windows

Address book

1. In PowerMail 2 we had groups which were really folders of
people. We now have proper groups in the address books, which
contain references to recipients; we also have implemented
real folders, and it is possible to have folders which
contain groups.
2. Ability to sort address books by first name, last name or
display name
3. Type-selection upon addressing displays in a popup window
4. Multiple e-mail addresses per recipient with a default
address

Searching

1. Search result windows are either stand-alone or full mail
browsers and relevance appears graphically just as in
Sherlock
2. There is a new column for showing the location of a found
items (check: and a contextual menu to open the folder in
which an item is contained)
3. Background indexing (using threads) of mail messages;
improves our AIAT/Sherlock search technology code.

Please note: this list is by no means complete.

----------------------------------------

[3] Reminder: What is PowerMail

PowerMail is an e-mail client for Macintosh that combines powerful features
with a clear, intuitive, and easy-to-use interface. PowerMail supports
multiple e-mail accounts, has advanced indexing and searching capabilities,
and supports multiple languages and script systems.

PowerMail is being developed by a dedicated team of five Macintosh software
developers who are determined to meet the needs of demanding users of
electronic mail. We think that an e-mail client can be powerful and
full-featured and still have an elegant interface and be easy to use. We
have implemented the features commonly found in leading e-mail applications
(multiple accounts, filtering, encoding, enclosure management) while
offering a unique focus on the following areas:

Mobile usage:
* PowerMail's POP3 implementation can minimize PPP connection durations by
converting and indexing messages once off line, in addition to deferring
periodic mail checking until a PPP connection is active.

Find by content:
* By including support for Apple's Sherlock Technology (the Apple
Information Access Toolkit), PowerMail offers unparalleled speed in
searching archived mail message content as well as relevance-ranked
searches.

* PowerMail's ability to import and export messages makes it easy to start
enjoying the benefits of find-by-content using your existing mail archives.
PowerMail can import mail databases directly from Claris Emailer, Microsoft
Outlook Express 4.5, Netscape Communicator, Eudora Pro, Eudora Light and
Unix mailbox formats.

World-ready:
* Because the Internet connects users of many languages, we have focused on
meeting the needs of simple and complex languages alike, and allow for
messages to be written and read in Japanese, Korean, Chinese (simplified
and traditional), Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Cyrillic (Bulgarian, Russian,
and Ukrainian), Hindi, Sanskrit, Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi, and Nepali
text (using any of three Indian writing systems: Devanagari, Gujarati, and
Gurmukhi) in addition to all accented Western languages (English, French,
German, Italian, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese,
Danish and others).