I have not used PowerMail's IMAP capability but as a POP client it is exceptional. I have found no other POP client that can do so much with such ease and efficiency, no matter how many messages are stored. Finding messages in large files has always been fast in PowerMail but now it is astonishing. Compared to e-mailers that search the contents of e-mail using string searches--all e-mailers save Apple's Mail--well, for large files there is no comparison. Compared to Apple's Mail, PowerMail is faster, feels more responsive, is more straightforward for novice users and is more versatile for advanced ones. The only way Mail is superior, as a POP client, is that Mail's spam filtering, although less powerful potentially, does not require specifying a lot of rules. (Mail will also generate HTML e-mail but I do not consider that an advantage.)

For folks who don't like HTML e-mail, PowerMail is remarkably sensible. It can be set safely to ignore HTML within the program but if the formatting must be seen, clicking on an icon will display the message within a web browser.

Although PowerMail uses its own proprietary data structures, it allows easy importing from and exporting to all standard formats and several proprietary ones. It also incorporates suitable tools for repairing those data structures and will allow the use of Apple's Address Book.

With this release PowerMail has addressed almost every shortcoming of the program, leaving only minor ones indeed. With this release I'm raising my rating from four stars to five. It's only significant deficiency as a POP server is that it cannot cope with network glitches if its database is located on another computer and accessed by an unreliable ethernet.