Balzac
Balzac is an email application for OS X 10.4 and above, which aims to provide clear views on your mail whilst allowing fast, sophisticated searches of past correspondence. It has been written to utilise all the advanced services available in OS X, from the address book to the built in spell-checker.
Features
The list below is a short summary of the most interesting features of Balzac.
- Dynamic views on your mail (i.e. ‘Smart Folders’)
- User defined categories – messages can be in several categories at once
- An inbox which shows you messages from the last few days
- Fast searches on header fields or text content of all messages
- Customize the way you view your mail with HTML templates for list views and message views
- Send custom HTML email using templates
- Supports Growl notifications
Work on Balzac can be sporadic, as I have other paid work which has to take priority. However I still use it every day, and plan to move searching to spotlight soon.
Recent changes
Version 1.0 b29
18 October 2007
- Fixed bug in whitelister dealing with numeric HTML attributes
- Removed spurious status messages in Leopard
- Worked around date parsing bug in Leopard causing inbox to display as empty
Version 1.0 b28
14 October 2007
- Fixed bug introduced in b27 meaning messages could not be sent with ‘Plain Text’ style
- Fixed bug meaning Trashed messages were showing up in other views
- Spam and Trash views can now have useful sub-views
Version 1.0 b27
10 October 2007
- Relaxed Whitelister slightly to allow attributes like bgcolor and colspan
- Whitelister now deals better with various types of malformed HTML, and removes spurious xml declarations
- Window close button now reflects edited state of drafts
- Textile now off by default in plain text messages
- Fixed bug meaning messages tagged Mailing List and Spam were not shown in Spam view
- Fixed bug with display of bracketed urls
- Removed rubygems require in tagger.rb
- Automatically generated Mailing List view now shows messages correctly
- Subviews of Mailing Lists view now show messages
- Fixed bug in plain text rendering of bolded text with punctuation characters between them
- Now adds emails with company name only or no names to address book auto-complete list
- Fixed bug introduced in b26 where saved drafts not replaced when edited after restart of app
- Fixed styling issue causing links in message bodies to be underlined
Version 1.0 b26
04 October 2007
- Fixed bug rendering returns in some plain text messages
- Summary now replaces newlines with spaces
- Saved drafts now restore styling
- Saved drafts now restore signature setting
- New messages no longer have a tab character at end in compose view
- Fixed bug causing instability on attempting to edit connect minutes in new prefs dialog
- Replying to ‘To do’ message removes ‘To do’ tag
- Fixed bug when pressing cancel twice in find panel
- Fixed bug in system version check
- Fixed CPU usage caused by unreleased timer
- Added table rows to permitted tags
- Fixed bug rendering new lines and multiple line quotes in replies
- Added tagging of outgoing messages
- Reply-to header field now respected for mailing list messages
- Auto-complete emails no longer prefixed with a blank space if no name in address book
Version 1.0 b25
30 September 2007
- Add a sheet on closing draft window – Discard or Save Draft
- Fixed bug assigning new port to Receive or Send port in Accounts prefs
