SmartWrap 1.7 - Email Cleanup Tool

SmartWrap is a no-fuss tool for cleaning and re-wrapping text from forwarded emails or replies in the most simple fashion possible. Plug-ins for Eudora and many Mac OS X email programs make SmartWrap a bit easier to use, but that cannot make up for its lack of formatting power (especially when it comes to quoted text) and options.

In its infancy, all text is innocent. As it grows and advances through the email system, replies and forwards add many a wrinkle and false line break. When that happens — fortunately, it happens less often today —, purification is needed.

SmartWrap offers some. In extremely simple a manner, SmartWrap takes text from the clipboard (or directly from Eudora or OS X email programs from BBEdit to Mail to PowerMail), removes unnecessary white space and newline as well as quotation characters and lets you paste the cleaned text back in your email. Under Mac OS X, SmartWrap also installs as a Service that can be used from any application.

It is nice that all this happens without much intervention, but the lack of options — what quotation characters to look for or whether and where to break text, for example — is definitely a drawback. It is even more of a pity that SmartWrap cannot wrap text smartly in replies preserving the quotation level.

All in all, SmartWrap is a simple and not entirely useless but also not thoroughly useful little app.