Looking for a good email application
I’ve used Eudora for my email for the last seven years, ever since I started using graphical email clients. Eudora has many wonderful features — it’s fast, it uses the standard mbox format, it has a simple UI, and so on. Recently, though, I’ve been running into a number of limitations with it. In no particular order:
- Its attachment handling is rather poor. It treats PGP signatures and vcards as attachments and it won’t let me drag attachments to the Trash to delete them.
- Its MIME digest support is just good enough to get me to try it and just broken enough to render it useless. MIME digests get received as Eudora mailboxes, which is very cool, but the mailboxes are attachments and clutter up your Attachments folder. Worse, since they’re mailboxes they show up in the Mailboxes menu. Since I turned on MIME digests a week ago I keep having to restart Eudora to make the Mailboxes menu useful again.
- Its address book isn’t tied in to the Mac OS X Address Book application. I don’t want to type all of that information twice. Since I have seven years of addresses in Eudora, I haven’t really used Address Book at all yet. I’d like to start using it, but not if it’ll be out of sync with my mail program.
- Its HTML mail support is awful. I hate HTML mail and try to receive as little of it as possible, but it’s unfortunately often unavoidable. When I have to cope with HTML mail, I want to be able to read it.
- Its user interface, though fast and simple, screams System 7. I happen to really like antialiased fonts like Lucida Grande and Optima, but Eudora doesn’t look good with those because it doesn’t draw them antialiased. Much of its user interface still looks like it needs an update for Aqua.
With all of that, I’m interested in switching to a new email application. The catch, of course, is that there’s little reason to switch unless I can do better than what I have today. I can compromise on a few of the advantages of Eudora that I mentioned above — I don’t need mbox, for example, if I can finally convince myself to set up the copy of Retrospect that I bought in January (it looks complicated, and I don’t like dealing with complicated software).
The obvious first contender is Apple’s Mail, but I’m not a huge fan of Mail. It isn’t as flexible as Eudora, it doesn’t search as well, it’s less stable, and it’s slower. Then again, it certainly looks better than Eudora, it uses mbox (I think), and if anyone’s going to take advantage of the latest Mac OS X technologies like the Address Book, Apple will. Are there other contenders? Goodness knows there are tons of email applications for Mac OS X, but it’s tough to figure out which one I’d like the most without trying all of them, and I’d rather not do that. I’m definitely not averse to paying for the right program; I just need to find it.
Erik J. Barzeski Said,
May 22, 2003 @ 6:12 am
I use Entourage, and that’s my vote.
Steve Roy Said,
May 22, 2003 @ 6:19 am
I went through this about a year ago. I had been using Outlook Express in Classic mode until then. I was very happy with OE, but Entourage was only available as part of the whole Office package, which I didn’t especially need.
I looked at Eudora but hate many of its quirks, including its UI. I like Mail to some degree, but the three times I tried to start using it I ran into problems. It couldn’t do certain things I wanted, like automatically applying filters to outgoing mail, among other things. It also seems to have a mind of its own sometimes, which I detest.
I finally opted for Mailsmith, from Bare Bones. It’s not the best thing since sliced bread, by far, but it does what I need, and when it doesn’t do it built-in, there’s always a way to script it. It’s very slow though, and that’s my main gripe about it. You can pretty much forget about reading email while it’s downloading email. You can also forget about being productive while it’s searching. Its modal search dialog takes over the UI, and for some reason it takes forever.
Now I happen to own Entourage, and honestly, I’m sometimes tempted to switch to it. But I like the feedback I get on the mailsmith-user mailing list, I like the customizability of Mailsmith, I like its simple uncluttered UI, I like its handling of HTML mail, I like its integration of BBEdit-like developer tools, I like how it uses mbox files, so for now I’m sticking to it and I’m looking forward to what Bare Bones is going to do for the 2.0 version. They are well aware about the speed issues, so I expect them to have done something about it in 2.0, but there’s no telling when it’s going to be available.
Steve
Michael Tsai Said,
May 22, 2003 @ 8:40 am
I like Mailsmith. It’s the only one that does HTML mail right.
Michael Tsai Said,
May 22, 2003 @ 8:42 am
Here’s the link that I tried to include before but that got stripped by Movable Type:
http://www.atpm.com/8.04/mailsmith.shtml
Jon Gales Said,
May 22, 2003 @ 8:43 am
The only big issue with MailSmith is that it doesn’t do IMAP. Weird. Other than that it’s “a BBEdit for email.”
Marc Said,
May 22, 2003 @ 11:25 am
You don’t want to go back to Outlook?
Chris Hanson Said,
May 22, 2003 @ 3:27 pm
I bit the bullet and switched to Mail.app a couple weeks ago. So far it’s working out very nicely. Yeah, it’s a little slower and it’s taking some time to un-wire my brain from Eudora (which I’ve been using for somewhere between 10 and 13 years), but so far it’s fairly happy.
What gives me confidence in Mail.app is that all the people that matter at Apple use it. That is, I expect any truly fatal flaws will eventually be addressed, particularly when they’re flaws that effect people who deal with large volumes of mail like I do (and like I’m sure you do).
Plus the junk mail filtering in Mail.app and multiple-account support is quite nice. And it’s wonderful to finally be able to use emacs keybindings when writing my email…
(More on my LiveJournal at http://www.livejournal.com/users/chanson/ )
Nicholas Riley Said,
May 22, 2003 @ 8:29 pm
Like you, I used Eudora for many, many years as my only email program. Sometime in 2000 I switched to Mutt, and my mail-reading productivity went up significantly. The primary advantage is that I no longer have to worry about manually managing my mail - it gets automatically filed by month, threaded, and I just archive mailboxes once a year. Also, I can access my mail from wherever I can find a SSH connection, instead of having to set up IMAP access, webmail or some other kludge.
Mutt takes some getting used to and configuring, but I’m now a huge amount more productive reading mail than I used to be. The only thing I miss about Eudora is decent multifolder search, but with Zoe that’s not an issue either.
For those few times I need to write HTML mail, I use both Eudora and Mail.app with IMAP. For reading, I have Mutt set up to pipe mail through w3m, producing a serviceable character-based representation, then launch w3m or Safari (depending on whether I’m remotely logged in) if it’s not enuogh.
That said, I’ve heard impassioned testimonials about Mailsmith, GyazMail, Mulberry and PowerMail from friends, so I would suggest you at least check out each of these. I’ve also heard lots of stories about Entourage corrupting entire mail stores, and both Mail.app and Entourage being extremely slow with large amounts of mail. Take these for what they’re worth.
Andrew Said,
May 23, 2003 @ 6:13 am
I went from berkeley mail and elm to Eudora (MacOS) in 1994. 1998 i switched back to elm. 1999 to today I’ve been using mutt.
Overall, mail clients aren’t very good because microsoft has destroyed the market for them by offering outlook and outlook express for free and bundling them with their OS, not to mention destroying standard conventions for things like quoting and headers.
Sha Sha Said,
May 23, 2003 @ 11:26 am
REAL MEN USE PINE!!!
Or something.
Not that I would really know, not being a, you know, man or a Mac user…
