2 weeks ago I tried to switch to Thunderbird from Apple’s Mail.app. This experiment only lasted a couple of days before I went back to Mail.app. I still have the same complaints about it, but the others had some annoying flaws as well. I’m going to give Thunderbird another shot when it has an unread message counter in the dock icon.
Thunderbird
Lots to like about this. I don’t do much with auto filters, but the flexible ‘view’ filters for mailboxes is awesome. I created a ‘last 24 hours’ filter that is quite handy.
Nitpicks:
- No ‘unread message count’ in the dock icon. I’ve come to rely on that.
- Cmd M is the global shortcut for ‘minimize to dock’, but it is ‘New E-mail’ in Thunderbird.
- If the mailbox window has been closed, it doesn’t re-open when you switch to Thunderbird.
- Nightly build version I downloaded seems to hang if it can’t connect to the server to save a copy of a sent message - I’ll need to try it again in a week.
Mulberry
Seems very feature rich, but the interface screams ‘I was built by an engineer’. It just didn’t feel elegant - I didn’t care for most of the defaults and it didn’t make me want to learn enough to change them.
- Annoying pop-up messages after 20 minutes in the demo version. Let me give it a real test before nagging me, huh?
- The stupid software reset my default mail client to itself without asking me - buh-bye, won’t miss you.
Eudora
I downloaded Eudora to give it a try. It seems to work better with IMAP now than it did when I last tried it a little over a year ago. I don’t like the way it only downloads the headers and you have to wait for it to download the message every time you open a new e-mail. Maybe there was a setting for this, but I didn’t look that hard. Like Mulberry, the UI just didn’t feel like a modern app.
Popularity: 3% [?]
Geof adds this Comment:
Yes, Mulberry was indeed designed by engineers. I hadn’t thought about a Mac user trying to use it.
I didn’t realize that it changed itself to your default client. Oi. That stinks.
April 10th, 2004 at 1:12 pm
Lars-Andreas Kvisle adds this Comment:
How about Opera’s M2? I’d say it’s well worth a test. The 7.5 beta version is available for Mac and judging by experience with the beta for Windows, it’s stable enough already. Definitly stable enough for testing purpose.
Mac Beta & Opera M2 intro.
Good luck!
April 11th, 2004 at 1:28 pm
chris adds this Comment:
How did you create a last 24 hours filter in thunderbird?
April 18th, 2004 at 12:22 pm
Alex adds this Comment:
Choose ‘Customize’ from the ‘View’ menu (the filter), then create a filter where ‘Age in Days’ ‘is less than’ ‘1′.
April 18th, 2004 at 4:34 pm
Richard adds this Comment:
How many have PGP/MIME integration, using either PGP or gnupg?
Still just Mulberry?
April 26th, 2004 at 6:34 pm
Alex adds this Comment:
It looks like they all do:
http://openpgp.vie-p[...]rier_en.html
April 26th, 2004 at 6:38 pm
alexking.org: Blog adds this Trackback:
Thunderbird Notes
Inspired by Kevin’s post, I decided to give Thunderbird another chance this week. I’ve used it 90% of the time, only going back to Mail.app a few times - but I don’t think I’m ready to switch all the way yet. Unfortunately, there are severa…
December 1st, 2004 at 8:50 pm