×

MailSuite and Sonoma 😢

Apple announced it would stop allowing Mail plugins in a future operating system when it announced macOS 11 (Big Sur) in 2021. That time has come. Although it has not made a formal announcement, Mail on macOS 14 (Sonoma) will no longer load Mail Plugins.

MailMaven: The Future of MailSuite Functionality

Even though we cannot rewrite MailSuite as a Mail Extension (see below), we have a way forward for our customers to retain all the information and processing capabilities they expect from MailSuite: MailMaven, our own email client with the functionality of MailSuite built in.

We have been working on MailMaven as a side project for a few years, and with a greater focus since Apple announced it would kill Mail plugins. We plan to have a beta release by the end of the summer so that existing customers can take a look and provide feedback. You can keep up to date about MailMaven at https://mailmaven.app.

How You Can Help

We are appealing to our customers to support us as we transition from MailSuite to MailMaven. We have stopped selling MailSuite to new customers as it will not work in Sonoma. However, we ask our existing customers to renew their Maintenance Plans when they expire.

An active Maintenance Plan will continue to give you access to Sync Services and updates needed to keep MailSuite running on Big Sur, Monterey and Ventura, and it gives you access to MailMaven when it becomes available. Furthermore, if you are loyal to us, we will be loyal to you by locking in your MailMaven Maintenance Plan at the price you are paying now for as long as the plan is active.

We are tremendously excited. This is not an end for us but a new beginning. It is a huge change, and there will be challenges ahead. We hope that you will stay with us to meet them.
We cannot wait to hear your feedback and suggestions for MailMaven!

---

About Mail Extensions

To provide an alternative to plugins, Apple introduced Mail Extensions in 2021. However, extensions' access to Mail is nowhere near enough to facilitate the functionality needed for MailSuite’s components to work within Mail.

As an analogy, Mail Plugins invited developers into Mail like a roommate. They could make themselves at home, change the look and feel a bit, add some of their own stuff, and rearrange the furniture. Mail Extensions, on the other hand, ask the developer to wait at the door and respond to specific requests Mail makes.

There is no mechanism to add tags to messages so that they appear in the Snippet or List view. Extensions cannot apply rules to outgoing messages. They cannot set up a separate window to display selected messages, and Mail Extensions cannot change email signatures—all things MailSuite needs to work.