I know there are a few The Bat! users around here.
I've been using the program for years. A while back, when I started to do more and more portable computing, I invested in the Pro version so I could use Voyager, the portable version of The Bat!
It's always been well-behaved, and I dislike deleting any email I might need to refer to later, so I set up a local account and I have a series of rules and filters that move mail from a live email account to one or other of the local folders, giving me encrypted storage of my email archives that's available even when I can't get at the 'net.
Which is all very fine and pleasant in theory.
However, some months ago, I started seeing a recurring problem. Mark a message as read (from the virtual "all unread mail" folder I created) then move it to a local, archive folder to hold stuff I've dealt with. Mostly, it works. Sometimes, it crashes violently, taking out the real source folder that the relevant email was in, often the destination folder also, sometimes others.
The folder maintenance routine in The Bat recovers anything it finds into files you're supposed to be able to read with a text editor. But that doesn't happen with Voyager, because it encrypts everything it stores. Result: I've lost absolutely tons of mail, my last good backup also has some corruption and my every attempt to recover mail from the backup generally lasts a couple of hours before the next crash.
Tech support haven't been much help, sadly.
So... any opinions on best way forward? I know there's a new version of TB -- v5 -- just come out, but they say it's a complete, ground-up rewrite and that sounds like a step into the dark. (There's no Voyager v5 yet anyway.) If I'm to replace TB with something else, I need similar levels of configurability, a similarly competent editor, the ability to manage multiple accounts and protocols without causing me to break into a sweat, and speed and reliability even if it's managing thousands of stored emails. (I grant it might be a while before my archive's that big again.
)
