Or something.

Not that I would really know, not being a, you know, man or a Mac user…

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.

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.

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/ )

http://www.atpm.com/8.04/mailsmith.shtml

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