I’m giving Mozilla Thunderbird a shot as my default mail client on the Mac. I’ve used it for over a year as my mail client on a PC and I’m getting fed up with Mail.app. The stupid auto-expanding and collapsing folders and inconstant click response when trying to drag messages around is driving me nuts.
I’d love to give Mailsmith a shot, but alas they still don’t have an IMAP version available. I’m tempted to try Eudora again as well. Eudora was my favorite mail client for 5 years while I used POP email – alas, Eudora’s IMAP performance was quite dismal at the time I made the switch to IMAP.
I’m going to use Thunderbird exclusively for the next week and see what I think.
UPDATE: Kevin Gerich and Scott MacGregor have brought their fit and polish to Thunderbird. I grabbed the nightly and its awesome. Great job guys!
Alex:
You should look into Mulberry.
I downloaded it and tried it for a half hour or so. My impression is that it is powerful but not elegant. I probably won’t be trying it again because after 20 minutes or so, every significant click I made brought up the ‘you are using this in demo mode’ dialog and I had to dismiss it. Very annoying.
I’ll tell you what I’m annoyed about in Mail.app. If you shift-arrowkey up or down, when you reverse the direction you don’t backtrack, you actually just ADD to the direction you’re going!?! Which is exactly opposite of everything else in the entire OS!
Yeah, the click-dragging of messages annoyed me too. I found out that once the mouse button is down, you have to move it left or right, not up and down. This seems to hold true for Address Book as well. Weird! Why would Apple do that? I’m happy with Mail.app for now. Far better than Entourage…
Mac Mail Clients Revisited
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 …
I would strongly recommend using Thunderbird over any other mail client. I have used all verions of Outlook, and the program, my god takes forever to load. I tried Euroda, I believe it was called and I didn’t find the interface to be very user friendly. If you are not happy with Mozilla’s mail client, I would suggest trying out Mozilla Firefox, a great alternative to Internet Explorer.
Take a look at later TBird posts and please read the entire post before commenting. I’m on a Mac, Outlook isn’t an option nor one I’d consider.