In general Mailspring is pretty good in understanding which language is being typed in order to perform spellchecking, but it needs some amount of text to do this. However, when the text is short, I have found myself without spellchecking and without being able to define one manually.
I’m writing on Mailspring in 3 languages, 2 of which are English and French. In my case this can be a problem as they are not my primary languages and spelling-wise they are close and some times identical, making mistakes easy to happen.
So the suggestion would be to include a spellchecking button in the compose window (that would be in auto-detect by default) that would allow us to force a specific spellchecking language for the specific window when the text is too short or somehow things fail.
Perhaps another way to estimate/detect the language very early would be to sniff the current keyboard language. eM Client employs that method and it has worked very well for me.
Hey Alex, thanks for reporting this! Right now, you can actually change the spellcheck language from Preferences > General. I think we could add a dropdown / picker of some sort to the mail composer itself, but Mailspring should be picking up on the language you’re using within the first sentence or so. Are you seeing it continue to spellcheck in english (for example) after more than a few sentences of French?
Autotodect works excellent for me, it is just that often my email might be a single sentence or so, and in that case autodetect doesn’t fire off or isn’t able to detect the language.
I’m also thinking that a spellchecker selection could allow us to check for two languages in the same email (for example my emails often have words in English (for example IT jargon) even if they are written in another language.
Anyway, this is not a dealbraker in any case. It is something that would give us just a bit of more control, but it shouldn’t break the current default behavior. If all this makes sense to you, then it might be a candidate for implementation.