About MailMaven

MailMaven is a full-featured email app for Mac that includes sophisticated features for processing and organizing your mail similar to those in SmallCubed’s earlier plugin for Apple Mail, MailSuite.

The MailMaven Approach

Apart from the ordinary tasks of receiving and viewing email, MailMaven’s overall philosophy involves four elements, which we refer to using the acronym POMS: process, organize, monitor, send:

• Process: Do something—anything—with incoming messages, or even those that have been sitting on your Mac for a while. Processing messages (especially automated processing) keeps inbox clutter under control with a minimum of effort and makes it easier for you to find things later. Examples of processing include applying rules to take various actions on messages as they come in (or on demand later), moving or copying messages using keyboard shortcuts, and filtering out spam.
• Organize: MailMaven’s extensive tagging features enable you to apply metadata such as keywords, colors, projects, notes, importance, flags, review dates, and more to your messages. Then use that metadata later to zero in on exactly the messages you need in a flash.
• Monitor: Use smart mailboxes, conversations, and MailMaven’s detailed reviewing and tracking system to be sure nothing slips through the cracks. MailMaven can help you remember which messages are still awaiting replies, which ones need additional attention from you in the future (even if they’re no longer in your inbox), and how a complicated, branching email thread fits together.
• Send: Send messages immediately, a fixed amount of time in the future, or on a specific schedule. And, using MailMaven’s templates, you can easily customize the look, feel, and contents of those messages.

Migrating from Apple Mail

When you opened MailMaven for the first time, you should have seen a window offering to take you through the steps of migrating your existing accounts (including both their settings and their message) from Mail. Assuming you stepped through that process, some or all of the data in Mail should now be in MailMaven. (If you didn’t import one or more accounts at the beginning, go to Settings > Accounts > Mail Accounts and click the Import icon at the bottom of the account list to perform the migration now.)

Although importing your accounts, mailboxes, and messages from Mail gets you off to a great start, MailMaven makes no attempt to migrate other Mail settings (including things like signatures and rules), so you’ll have to recreate those things on your own.

As of version 1.0, there are several features found in Mail that MailMaven does not have. Here are a handful of these, just as examples:

• No support for POP accounts.
• A rule action can’t trigger an AppleScript.
• There’s nothing similar to MailDrop, which automatically uploads large attachments to the cloud and inserts a link instead.
• There are no VIP senders or muted conversations as such, though you can largely replicate their effects using tags and/or rules.

If these or other “missing” features are important to you, take heart: SmallCubed’s wish list for future versions is long, and over time, you’ll likely see most of the things you wish you had now. (You can see lists of known issues and feature requests on the SmallCubed website.)

Those items aside, MailMaven doesn’t look just like Mail (on purpose!). Many elements have different names, locations, and icons. Some of the behaviors might initially seem unexpected, though keep in mind that you can customize hundreds of things about MailMaven (see The Settings Window and throughout this documentation). Our advice is that if something doesn’t seem quite the way you expect:

• First, try doing things the (default) MailMaven way. After a few hours or days, you might find that you get used to this approach, or even prefer it!
• If something is still bugging you, check through the settings (and this documentation) to see whether there’s a way to adjust it. There probably is!