Does anyone have any recommendations for good e-mail software? I’ve been using Mail for years but since updating to Snow Leopard it seems that Mail sometimes fails to download all of my IMAP e-mails - I’ve been receiving some mails two or three days late. Until a couple of days ago, I thought this was a delivery problem pertaining to Dreamhost, my web hosts who provide my e-mail server, but the other day I discovered that several e-mails had been sitting in my online Squirrel mail account for a couple of days - Mail just hadn’t grabbed them (it finally did so a few hours after I had discovered them online). I’m guessing this is a Snow Leopard/Mail problem given that I never had this problem until recently.
I abandoned it for Mail as I prefer to KISS my platforms and only install things that provide significant benefits that are not available out of the box (Ex Scirv has no equal in OSX, but I only use Safari for browsing these days). When I did use it I loved it. Then again my other option at the time was outlook…
I still have yet to find a good IMAP client for the Mac that I can really feel comfortable in. This is one area of the Mac that is a bit frustrating to me. Mail is all right, but does some things in a fashion which annoy me, and yes, has always felt a little “flaky” to me. Granted I have it hooked up to about half a dozen different accounts with full mirroring of over 20,000 e-mails, so that might not be “normal” usage. Sometimes it just dies and I have to wipe the whole thing out and set it all up from scratch again.
Thunderbird feels like Mozilla did, back in the day when it was a behemoth. That thing badly needs a “Firefoxing”. Maybe Postbox is that, but I’m not sure yet.
If you can live without IMAP and HTML reception, MailSmith is not a bad option. It used to be over-priced, but Bare Bones ditched it earlier this year and it is now being operated as freeware from here. It’s the best client I’ve used on the Mac—but only, and only if you can sacrifice IMAP. I’m not sure I can, though I have been considering it, even though it feels like stepping back a decade.
Speaking of which: I’ve experimented with using mutt/pine/et cetera, which back when I used nothing but Linux, were all I used. Not a bad solution if you don’t mind the hassle of configuration, and also don’t mind living in a terminal window for all of your mail usage. Some of these “old” clients were and are still the best in terms of stability and features.
I’ve been a GyazMail user since very soon after I first moved up to OS-X on first release, as I found none of my Chinese friends could read my emails — coding not supported by Windows, and not changeable at my end for outgoing mails; Apple rectified that in the first upgrade, but by then I’d invested my $18 in GyazMail, and every time I go back and try Mail.app it rapidly drives me mad!
GyazMail does IMAP as well as POP, and has two features I love: (1) as well as “filters” that allow you to move mails into specific folders on download and all the rest — common to all good mail apps I reckon — it has “rules” which apply to the contents of the server, so that you can tell it to delete those annoying mails from Manchester United, etc. on the server and not download them; (2) you can access the server mailbox directly through it, so that when a neighbour uses some crappy html template with a sky-blue-pink background with flowers and butterflies on it, which chokes the download process every time you try, you can go to the server mailbox, download mails one by one until you discover it’s that one, and then delete it manually from the server … you then write a polite message to your neighbour saying that plain-text emails are more user-friendly!
The only thing I wish it had that Mail.app does or used to, is the ability to click a button to bounce a mail back to sender as if unread … “Return to sender! No such number! No such zone”.
Also, I’m currently trying to experiment, but don’t have enough time, with MailSteward (mailsteward.com) mentioned on another thread here, which is an app to archive mails locally, in my case on my TimeCapsule, so it doesn’t matter which of my two MBP or MBA I read a given mail on, it will be sent to a common archive so it will be accessible to both, as necessary. So far, I think it’s looking good, but as I say, not enough time to really test it yet.
IMAP is a pain on OSX, alas. My favorite email programme would normally be Powermail. Unsurpassed search options and very very fast. I relied on it for more than 8 years. But it fails on two counts: IMAP is horrible in PM, and the text engine is still not unicode savvy. I upgraded to its latest version, which promised better IMAP support, but quickly abandoned it because it failed to deliver (read: crashed a lot and doesn’t allow more than a single IMAP account; I have three IMAP accounts).
I did not like Postbox too much (the new mails view in particular), I definitely don’t like Mail (which is soooo slow compared to PM), Gyazmail’s search is snaillike in comparison to PM, and some others I have meanwhile forgotten (Gnumail amongst others).
I wish Powermail would be rewritten, as I am sort of forced by my employer to use IMAP, and have since come to like the fact because I have my sent mails on each device/computer I use. Hence I use Mail these days. At least it doesn’t lose emails anymore as it did a couple of years back. But each and every day I miss the search facility of Powermail, on which I came to rely, as I would always find what I needed. No longer.