[besson3c]

This comparison is between Leopard Mail and Thunderbird. I'd throw in Entourage, but I don't use it myself. I'm rather bias about its stupid need to throw everything into a database, its reported consequent mailbox corruption, its lack of TLS support until 2004, etc. If you want to contrast any of these comparisons against Entourage, I welcome your input!


All in all, while OS X Mail is still missing several advanced email features, there seems to be enough there for me to use on a semi-regular basis, but I will still require some part-time use in Thunderbird. There are several nice new features that may make this inconvenience worthwhile though.

Here is a feature by feature comparison of things that make it or break it for me:


IDLE support

Finally! I didn't even realize that Tiger Mail was missing this feature, but it makes sense, as Tiger mail was extremely chatty and unusably slow for me due to wanting to constant resynchronize. Why IDLE support was missing from Tiger Mail is beyond me, this is hardly a bleeding edge feature. One question though: why would there even be a checkbox to turn this off? Why on Earth would anybody want to turn off IDLE support?

Mailbox subscription support

Mail still does not allow me to unsubscribe from my personal folders, only public and shared folders. However, while it is a pain to have to waste screen space with my archived folders, and while Mail is chattier at startup having to examine folders I don't care about, the addition of IDLE support seems to help a great deal - at least it keeps performance in check

Multiple identity support

This is still a deal breaker for me, I will still have to use Thunderbird for sending mail as non-default identities. This is my biggest feature request for Mail, and frankly I don't know why Apple has left this out all these years. Even lowly Entourage has this feature, AFAIK!

Cyrus Squatter support

Mail does not support Squat (server side indexing of Cyrus Mail accounts), but since Spotlight seems to work so well and is no longer a pain in the ass in terms of performance (coinciding with the chattiness of Tiger Mail), I can live with this.

Ability to define what folders to check for new mail in

Leopard Mail will look for new messages in all mailboxes, which is an improvement - particularly for server side mail filtering. However, if you are subscribed to a busy mailing list and have some sort of notification turned on (e.g. GrowlMail/Mail Appetizer) there is no way to define what folders to check for new mail on on a folder by folder basis...


All in all, I prefer OS X Mail's attachment handling over Thunderbird, its speed overall (especially after a few minutes of having Mail open having gone through all of my folders), its key bindings, unified mailboxes feature, and the new notes feature looks like it will be a real plus for me as well. Mail Appetizer is nicer than Thunderbird's Growl plug (although Bundles seem to be really crashy and unstable in Mail right now)

[besson3c]

One other OS X Mail complaint: why is it that messages from Outlook users are always in extremely tiny fonts? Very annoying...

[Cold Warrior]

Originally Posted by besson3c 

One other OS X Mail complaint: why is it that messages from Outlook users are always in extremely tiny fonts? Very annoying...

They're probably using the rich text or html options to compose their messages. From my experience, this 'hard sets' the font display in Mail and Entourage, and there's no way to automatically set it otherwise, unless one manually enlarges all msg text.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by Cold Warrior 

They're probably using the rich text or html options to compose their messages. From my experience, this 'hard sets' the font display in Mail and Entourage, and there's no way to automatically set it otherwise, unless one manually enlarges all msg text.

You might be right, I'm not sure what OS X Mail tries to do, but it is annoying. I don't have this problem in Thunderbird, and I would imagine that Entourage users don't either

[Cold Warrior]

Originally Posted by besson3c 

You might be right, I'm not sure what OS X Mail tries to do, but it is annoying. I don't have this problem in Thunderbird, and I would imagine that Entourage users don't either

If it's html text, I will have that issue in Entourage. The only workaround is to press Cmd+ to enlarge the text.

[goMac]

Originally Posted by besson3c 

Multiple identity support

This is still a deal breaker for me, I will still have to use Thunderbird for sending mail as non-default identities. This is my biggest feature request for Mail, and frankly I don't know why Apple has left this out all these years. Even lowly Entourage has this feature, AFAIK!

I'm not sure why this is important. You can set up multiple accounts and they'll have the same features as multiple identities.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by goMac 

I'm not sure why this is important. You can set up multiple accounts and they'll have the same features as multiple identities.

I think we've gone over this before, but multiple accounts only work when you are dealing with multiple mailboxes? What if you want to send out stuff via different from addresses and full names from within a single mailbox?

There are literally thousands of users that do this on our servers - departmental email addresses primarily.

[Cold Warrior]

Mail lets you add smtp servers without adding an incoming account.

[besson3c]

I knowk that Cold Warrior. It doesn't allow you to manage multiple identities though, does it? I can't switch between multiple from addresses/full names within an account.

[Cold Warrior]

Originally Posted by besson3c 

I knowk that Cold Warrior. It doesn't allow you to manage multiple identities though, does it? I can't switch between multiple from addresses/full names within an account.

Not sure what you mean. You could receive mail from multiple accounts, then choose which address you want to send from.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by Cold Warrior 

Not sure what you mean. You could receive mail from multiple accounts, then choose which address you want to send from.

Maybe it would be best to represent this in a scenario...

Say you are in an enterprise environment, such as the University I work for, where there is an entire department devoted to accounts management (creation, expiration, rationing, etc.) I can't just create for myself a "support@companyname.com" - this has to go through them, due to policy but also to prevent duplicates and/or confusion.

Say that several people need to access and respond out of support@companyname.com... One way I can do this is to give everybody the username/password to this account. However, if I want to create info@, sales@, intlsales@, etc. this would require managing passwords and setting up many different accounts, and all of this would have to be approved by the account department.

Moreover, each of our accounts have disk space quotas. It would be very difficult to allocate resources if we were to allocate our quota for each of these additional addresses and didn't place a limit on how many accounts can be created.

There are tons of organization and shared accounts within a university like this, tons of different projects, little groups, etc. We could set things up so that each person has, say a half-dozen accounts, but then what happens when somebody leaves the organization and we want to change the password for security reasons? It would be an utter pain to go through the hassle of getting everybody to change their passwords.

What about all the people that access their email through web-based email? Generally speaking, web-based email systems are setup to access one account at a time. Some support pulling in external POP accounts, but this is sloppy.

So, we have account rationing, resource allocation (disk space), the need to place limits on how many separate accounts can be created, security/password management, the popularity of webmail, etc. with creating all of these accounts. So what is the solution here? Ask anybody that has used Exchange before and they might say a shared folder. This is absolutely common among Groupware systems (of which there are several).

A shared mailbox/folder allows anybody that is granted permission access, and everybody that has access can reply. But if you are accessing this mailbox as you@company.com, how would you reply as sales@company.com or info@company.com, for instance? This is where multiple identities come in.


Here is another, far simpler scenario...

Many people use several alias/virtual addresses that redirect to a main account. What if somebody wants to reply as one of these addresses from their main account? They don't even have the option of setting up a different account because this address is not a separate account, it is just a redirect. What is the user to do here?


This starting to make some sense?

[goMac]

Originally Posted by besson3c 

I think we've gone over this before, but multiple accounts only work when you are dealing with multiple mailboxes? What if you want to send out stuff via different from addresses and full names from within a single mailbox?

There are literally thousands of users that do this on our servers - departmental email addresses primarily.

Mail.app lets me set up the same account over again, and I can give both accounts a different sender name and a different from address. I actually run Mail.app normally like this. My email address is gomac (at) mac dot com. I don't like using that address, so I have an alias set up, colin dot cornaby at mac dot com. I actually have both accounts set up in mail, they're both using the same server/loginname/password. Only one has a replyto of gomac (at) mac dot com, and the other has a reply to of colin dot cornaby at mac dot com.

I ended up just disabling my gomac address though, but it's still there in my mail account list.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by goMac 

Mail.app lets me set up the same account over again, and I can give both accounts a different sender name and a different from address. I actually run Mail.app normally like this. My email address is gomac (at) mac dot com. I don't like using that address, so I have an alias set up, colin dot cornaby at mac dot com. I actually have both accounts set up in mail, they're both using the same server/loginname/password. Only one has a replyto of gomac (at) mac dot com, and the other has a reply to of colin dot cornaby at mac dot com.

I ended up just disabling my gomac address though, but it's still there in my mail account list.

Last I tried to do this I couldn't even configure two accounts with the same email address without some error message.

Still, even if you can, it is still not ideal to have Mail much chattier and busier than usual in querying your account twice, plus having all of your email cached on disk twice. For email accounts with lots of mail and attachments this is a particular burden. Besides, what if you want three identities on a single email account?

[goMac]

Originally Posted by besson3c 

Last I tried to do this I couldn't even configure two accounts with the same email address without some error message.

Still, even if you can, it is still not ideal to have Mail much chattier and busier than usual in querying your account twice, plus having all of your email cached on disk twice. For email accounts with lots of mail and attachments this is a particular burden. Besides, what if you want three identities on a single email account?

You're right, seems that it didn't complain because one is a .Mac type of account.

Meh.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by goMac 

You're right, seems that it didn't complain because one is a .Mac type of account.

Meh.

Ahhhh.. that would explain it


Sort of disappointing that this isn't possible though, because perhaps you could make do with simply not having your additional account look for new mail every x minutes.

[zro]

Try a comma separated list of e-mail aliases in the "Email Address" field. You can then select any of them from the "From:" pop-up when composing or replying. Works for me.

The "Full Name" field is a one item deal, however.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by zro 

Try a comma separated list of e-mail aliases in the "Email Address" field. You can then select any of them from the "From:" pop-up when composing or replying. Works for me.

The "Full Name" field is a one item deal, however.

Yeah, I knew about that trick too... The lack of full name choice is the bottleneck though

[zro]

I really don't understand that. Do you exchange e-mail from the same account with people that you don't want to know your real name and with people who you do? Use a different account to do your dirty business.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by zro 

I really don't understand that. Do you exchange e-mail from the same account with people that you don't want to know your real name and with people who you do? Use a different account to do your dirty business.

Sort of. We try to train people to address our group and not the individuals in the group so that work can continue if one of us is gone, sick, has moved on, whatever...