Ioa-iffer (you still deserve this until vic-k distracts me), or other god-like member, feel free to move this to a more suitable place.
I need not explain my feelings toward certain software development organization located in Washington state. But I will give them one (and only one) compliment. I like the way that Outlook 2010 for that evil OS shows ALL emails in a thread no matter how they are distributed among PST/OST folders. I actually prefer this to Gmails “labels” which doesn’t allow you to actually move a mail to a particular folder (I use this to ensure that certain attachments live on certain OST on different drives (don’ ask, I do this crap for a living). Gmail is just stupid tagging where everything coexists. And it all lives on their servers which is pretty much against my basic theory of “information ownership” (don’t get me going on that I am one of the guys who lectures on data in transit and lack of ownership).
Enter the travesty that is mail.app on lion. WTF do they think they are doing? Sure I get this stupid thing that show all the emails in the thread but I have to manually move all the sent items to the inbox, I can’t segregate attachments, etc. I took Outlook 2010 on Mac for a spin (co workers machine) and they had no idea how to get the desired behavior (they use it strictly for the advanced integration with the cal server).
Someone bail me out. I need a real mail app. I know Ioa-iferr does that whole opera thing, but that lasted all of about … 30 minutes. Maybe I need to give it another go OR those much smarter folks here who have already checked every single app that exists for email can offer a suggestion.
So what do we recommend?
I really need to learn to make these posts shorter.
In Mail.app, the menu command you are looking for I think is View/Show Related Messages. It will gather all messages, no matter where they are stored, and show them together in one thread. That’s if you only want to view threads some of the time. If you prefer this way of looking at things all of the time, then check “Include related messages” in the View preference pane. It’s pretty close to how Outlook works in this regard.
I have a different take. I’ve been using Mail on the MBA since I upgraded it to Lion. I set up real mailboxes not “smart mailboxes” and rules to move mails that meet certain criteria into those boxes. That was fine, and the threading done where mails shared subject lines was good when I got used to it. But I don’t like having years of mails all in my mailbox and taking up hard disk space, so I invested in Mail Steward and am using that to archive mails. But I couldn’t get Mail to work with it as it was supposed to do and in the end I tried exporting from Mail to mboxes and importing those into MailSteward. Even though the folder hierarchy was identical to what I’d had before in GyazMail, it didn’t do it the same and has screwed up my Mail Steward archive for 2011 so I can’t search easily for mails.
So I’ve gone back to GyazMail on the new 17" MBP. I know I’ve been using it since the beginning of OS-X and am totally at home with it, and that it doesn’t suit everyone. But it has powerful rules and filters, and bucks the current trend of trying to do things for you. You have to set it up the way you want … it’s not hard, and for me it works. The only thing that wasn’t straightforward was getting it to work with iCloud, since Mail gives you b-gg-r all really useful information on your iCloud settings. On that, I dropped a line to the developer, Goichi Hirakawa — I have always found him immensely helpful and courteous, and prompt in his answers … he answered this request within 12 hours — who sent me screen shots of how his account is set up and I followed that … instant success.
I still have a version of my MailSteward 2011 archive from before this recent import screwed up the search possibilities, so I’m thinking of importing my mboxes into GyazMail, sorting it all out there and then re-exporting so I can restore the archive to normality with all the mails from the latter half of 2011 included.
Anyway, I don’t know if you looked at GyazMail when I mentioned it in a thread some two years or so ago, but you might like to take another look as it may enable you to do what you want. It’s not “pretty” in a latest interface kind of way — but I don’t give two hoots about that — and development is slow — you still can’t send rich text mails, for instance — but it handles multiple POP3 and IMAP accounts with aplomb; is small and fast so must be tightly coded; has good rule system for your local machine and filters you can create to dump spam at the server end without downloading it; and it also allows direct access to the server list if you want — when a buggy mail won’t download and is blocking others, for instance, you can open “Remote”, check the list, set it to delete that mail without downloading, and then the others can be downloaded.
Oh, and it’s USD18 … I’ve had ten years use for my 18 dollars!
Mr X. I am RTF required for … higher edumactional reasons that they could not explain (why exactly plain text is harder on servers than html/rtf was an argument that I chose to end with a “please don’t ever submit your resume for one of my team openings”). I think Gyaz might be out but I’ll give it a look.
Ioa-iffer, the big difference for me is the what the listing happens. In mail.app the non-local messages in the reading pane (and I could not get the setting to stick even with it in the option checked in preferences). In Outsmack, all the messages shown in the message listing. The ease of this is that I am able to select a single message from a buried folder based on the attachment icon rather than having to scroll through the entire thread to find said attachment. Hopefully that make some iota of sense.
As to my affectionate term for the email destroyer of that actually does what I need, today i won the “least number of crashes” contest. OL v 2010 on Win7 ent, connecting to OL 2010 server. Local system is a Dell 6300 series with 4GB ram. The lowest number of crashes today is … drum roll please … 6. And folks wonder why I won’t pay the $10 corporate rate to put it on my new mac.
Oh that does make sense, and I do agree with the overall angst. I’m not a huge fan of Mail, either, just as I’m not terribly much of a fan of any of Apple’s consumer applications. The OS I like because it gets out of my way if I put an elbow to its temple just so and once it understands my relationship with it it stays that way. But their consumer products are the annoying person with zero social barometer that frequents your otherwise favourite bar and always tries to talk with you even if you haul out a book and start reading it in the middle of his attempts.
So what are my options. You mentioned opera once, but I started looking for my tanto after about 3 sec of marking the same message read in 14 different folders (apparently it doesn’t work with with google label rules while mail.app actually gets it).
Are you really suggesting that I may need to run a winblows VM just to run outlook. Kill me now. Maybe I can avoid seppaku by using it to test scirv for win?
Yes, but I’m management now. Please. Stop making me feel dirty.
Here is something interesting. Outlook 11 for Mac does the view thing I want, but it is 32bit only. Can MS make it clearer that they are trying to kill the performance of apps on OSX. Thunderbird is a HUGE disappointment. I can’t believe that MS didn’t just steal this idea from someone.
Really all that this is is “tagging” by thread. If you think googles labels that is all we are talking about (multiple labels in multiple folders) just the main label is the subject.
Closest I am getting is Opera. Which means I might as well use Gmail. I hate the idea that I can not have an offline email option that actually works.
While I am b*tching about the mail.app view, it at least properly opens ics and other appointments. Not so much outlook. how about the lovely “no more than 2gb” limit outlook has on pst. Sure they fixed it. until you get to 2.4GB then you are SOL. BAH BAH BAH.
Iao-iffer-V would you please write an offline gmail client?
Instead of doing something useful like reading “THINK Sociology” chapters 1-3 or “Psychology” Concepts and connections (brief version)" chapters 1-4 and preparing my 5 page study overviews I have spent the entire evening looking for an email reader that will work the way I want.
Sparrow – $US10 in the app store. Basic. Full on app. You make some setting with your gmail profile and go. I am using the add supported version. I may drop the $10. But I just spent $350 on book (DON"T GET ME STARTED). Seems to be simple enough but I want to give it more time.
Google Gmail Offline – ummm duh. Only thing that makes this absolutely heinous that you have to run it in chrome. I use chrome on a few things and generally try to self immolate once I am done. Some folks love chrome I hate it. But it does deliver a more google-esque offline gmail. I’m keeping all matches and lighters at a distance while I give it a try.
Really Ioa, your slipping here. I can’t believe you didn’t have these already integrated into your MMD to FAQ to email to vic-k’s brain workflow.
Small contribution: I’ve used umpteen mail clients going back to CMS on an IBM mainframe, and Apple’s Mail suits me fine.
I used to sort incoming into all kinds of folders but found that’s a waste of time. It’s easier to let Spotlight do the searching for subjects, to/from exchanges, and strings of text. I save the mail in Vault folders, one for each year. I keep the last three years active and archive anything older. (Total traffic for most years is between 10k and 12k messages).
But, before archiving, I use DevonThinkPro Office to make a copy archive, and thus for really old mail, I can go searching there. That, and the occasional use of Saved Searches and Smart Folders, and I’m a fairly happy camper.
I also like being able to write and exchange RTF mail; since I can save/export files to DTP or Scrivener easily. Even made a template using school letterhead, for sending letters of reference and the like.
Auto-addressing works well, if you keep an Address Book up to date. One caveat: you have to groom the Previous Recipient List often; that command is hidden in the Window menu.
Not sure if this helps, but I use (and happen to like) Mail. Because I horde information, I almost never delete (or, sorry for the squeamish amongst you, even archive) old data. I’m too lazy to set up complex sorting rules or to manually file my messages (with a couple of exceptions, feel free to ask if you’re interested).
So that I am not overwhelmed with messages each day, I have a few smart folders. The one I live in most of the time I call “Recent Messages” - basically everything sent and received in the last 48 hours. Since most messages need to be dealt with within 48 hours, this works well. I mark messages unread (or flag them, a function that is much improved in Lion) if I can’t act immediately or want/need to follow-up. The fact that both sent and received messages are in the same smart folder deals with the threading issue. It also means I don’t need to worry about the excessive number of email accounts I maintain (they all display in the same SF, although I am toying with the idea of a new SF solely for one of my work accounts).
I also have a “Last week” smart folder for the previous 7 days. Other smart folders include one for all unread messages (see note about following up above), for key contacts (i.e., my thesis supervisors), and for some of the flags. I use SFs for other purposes too, but these are the main ones. Most of the time though, I live in Recent Messages and have the side-bar hidden.
Let me point out that this is very much like “strawberries”. I hate them. Wife loves them. Kids jsut leave the room.
I have discovered the following itch scratcher:
• Sparrow for looking at GMail style thread (all labels). I use Sparrow to archive all mails to the final label. This means first read and “WTF” rereads prior to archive.
• Mail.app is used for the various calendar integrations (I have 4 for me, then the family, then the pigeons then… I really need to let things happen) and power mail crap. Big caveat here is that I have to expose all my labels in IMAP.
So I have 2 mail apps running right now. Not the best, but it is a compromise.
I had two apps running, Mail for iCloud and GyazMail for everything else … it lasted about a month 'cos it was a real PITA! Thank you Mr Hirakawa for showing me how to get GyazMail talking to iCloud!
