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.