Thunderbird is the mail app from Mozilla, the people who make the Firefox web browser. It’s not 100% as “clean” as I would like, but it works well enough, and until I find something better, this is what I will be using. Recently, I decided to try this again, and found that it was actually possible to do.

Again, it’s a reasonable assumption that users will want to download email, so I can’t really fault them for this, but I found that it was extremely frustrating to deal with the error messages. First off, most of them won’t even let you delete the IMAP information, and if it is incorrect, they will continually throw error messages as you. Most email apps will freak out if you do this. My first attempt was to set up an email app that I don’t usually use, and then either change or delete the IMAP information, so that the app could not download email. Let’s be honest, that’s a reasonable assumption. Most email apps think they are doing exactly what users want by making sure that they retrieve email as effortlessly as possible. It turns out to be much harder than you might think. More specifically, I wanted an app which would be able to autocomplete from my macOS Contacts. That link will bring up a ‘Compose’ window, which you can use as normal, and then when you send the email, you will be left with a Gmail window which is basically inert. If you use Gmail (or “Google Suite” or whatever it is called), you can use a link like this to send email without ever seeing your Inbox: replace with your actual email address. Unfortunately, Mailsmith did not make the 64-bit transition, and another app known as “Let.ter” seems to have disappeared (although last time I checked, it did still work, but I don’t think it integrated with the macOS address book). Exactly 10 years ago today, I wrote Use Mailsmith to create a “send-only” email account for TUAW (which was later ‘replaced’ by Engadget).

Macro recorder for macintosh