2005-11-13 – This is my favourite comment, mainly because the reader so obviously failed to read the post. The user interface for Mail.app is well designed, and very functional. It’s that an application and it’s developers continue to release applications with substandard performance and features. This might be perfectly acceptable if Mail.app was an alpha or beta release, but it is production sofware. Blame the user, always the sign of a great developer, I hope your customers can expect better quality service from you as this post suggests you provide.
Apple Mail is the best user experience, i.e., Mail.app rocks! Not sure what your problem is, but I’m sure it has more to do with you than with the app. I’ve used it since it was introduced. It’s simple to use, uncluttered interface, easy to set up accounts (I have 12 email accounts, and I filter mail into a variety of mailboxes). I archive old email to keep it from consuming too much disk space. There are two kinds of problems. User created, and computer related. No offense, but I think your problem is the former.
2005-11-12 – I disabled my IMAP accounts, this has significantly improved performance. But manually archiving, why can’t someone build a mail system that “automatically” archives my messages (leave me alone, I could write an Automator script to do this in a time based manner, but why should I). If archiving email on a regular basis is required by the software for performance, doesn’t this seem like the responsibility of the developer.
I can’t take it any more, Apple Mail is the worst user experience. It’s not a usefulness problem, it’s not because of errors, it’s not because the UI is ugly, it’s because the performance is so poor that the Mail is absolutely unuseable. It has been a long time since I’ve felt like my 1.25GHz G4 processor and 1Gb of RAM were in adequate. But these feelings often come when I am running something more complex than Mail. If I was running Maya, Shake, even compiling a large code base, I could understand. But Pine runs just fine on my command line, it doesn’t seem to crash. Arrrggggghhhhh!
It looks like this is mostly related to my having a large inbox, i.e., I don’t archive anything, and having multiple IMAP accounts. The performance of this application is so bad, that it is forcing me to switch mail clients, yet again.
I switched to Mail from GMail which I switched to from Thunderbird when I upgraded to 10.4.x. Mainly because of the integration with Address Book and iCal. It may be time to reconsider mail programs for the Mac:
- Thunderbird
- Eudora which seems wrong because I haven’t run it since I ran System 8.5 or 9.x
- Opera there’s just something I don’t like about the UI
- “Entourage”: but I’ve bought iWork and I am trying not to have to pay for the MacOffice 2004
- MailSmith since I only recently switched from BBEdit to TextWrangler to TextMate this might be a good fit
- PowerMail
- There’s java-source.net ’s list of Java based email clients
- Sylpheed
- Evolution would be nice to run on Mac OS X
- Maybe I should try Chandler again
- OSS Watch summaries a variety of open-source mail clients including Pine.
Any recommendations?