MailMate has a very flexible plugin-system available via so-called bundles. There’s already a large set of bundles available, for example, for various task managers and text editors, but you can also create your own bundles with your own personal features.

Bundles have existed for MailMate for a long time, but the creation of bundles has been largely undocumented. This changed recently when I created a documentation page for bundles. This should make it easier to create personal bundles, but you are also very welcome to create bundles to be shared with other MailMate users. Companies with multiple MailMate users might also want to create their own company-wide bundles which could, for example, integrate with local issue tracking systems or provide easy creation of standard replies. If there’s something you would like to do which is not possible using bundles then let me know. I’d like to make it even more flexible than it already is.

Here’s a quote from the documentation which is related to the work MailMate has to do to help you avoid having to know anything about how to parse an email:

Parsing emails is really hard. You need to handle MIME parts, encrypted parts, various encodings like quoted-printable, base64, format=flowed, header encoded words, and various non- or semi-standard formats like tnef (winmail.dat). But much worse, you also have to work around numerous bugs and legacy types of behavior. Ideally, you need to be able to parse any email created by any version of any email client since the early 1970s.

If MailMate only allowed you to get the raw data of an email then it would be very hard to do anything useful and it would be close to impossible to make it robust. Fortunately, MailMate allows you to get the data you need after it has been decoded and after MailMate has worked around all the bugs and legacy stuff of the past.

On a more philosophical note, the main goal of MailMate is to provide input which takes care of as many of the existing email intricacies as possible before handing over data to commands or other parts of the interface. The many problems concerning the conversion of headers and bodies to any kind of canonical data should be handled by MailMate to keep everything else as simple as possible. In other words, canonicalization is to be MailMate’s side of the fence.

Implicitly, this also means that if you have an email which MailMate cannot parse as you would expect it to do so (even if it’s a buggy one) then let me know and I’ll look into yet another workaround.