[Harvey]

Which is the mail client of choice? Which should I be using to afford me the most protection? Which has more features? Is there a before email client out there? Would love to hear your views.
Harv

[Kyle Dreaden]

Originally Posted by Harvey

Which is the mail client of choice? Which should I be using to afford me the most protection? Which has more features? Is there a before email client out there? Would love to hear your views.
Harv

I made my switch about three or four years ago from the PC to my Mac. Up to that point, I had been using Outlook for everything. The obvious choice, at that point, was to use Entourage. Personally, I came from a school of thought that suggested that any included software with an OS was trash. When I made my switch initially, Jaguar was the OS version available. As much as it hurts me to say this, I think Mail was garbage at that point. It wasn't until Panther that I gave mail a shot. Now, the newest version of mail that comes in Tiger is outstanding. Far better design than Entourage, much better spam filtering, lighter-weight on the processor/ram, and I absolutely love the threaded-view option. I would definitely give it a shot.

[BZ]

Once you have your first corrupt Entourage database and lose everything, the choice will be much easier.

BZ

[Harvey]

Thanks to you both, BZ and Kyle.
http://forums.macnn.com/newreply.php...e=1&p=2696407#

[outsourced]

I used to provide support for Office/Mac. The other poster is correct: Once you lose your data, the decision about which product to use won't be difficult. I can't even count the number of times someone would call in anger because their mail was lost. And, unfortunately, the data would be unrecoverable. Naturally, there was no backup.

Entourage was/is notorious for database corruption. You had better keep up-to-date backups if you use it.

From a historical standpoint: Although I no longer use it, Netscape Mail never did me wrong. I stored YEARS of mail and NEVER had a problem. Of course, now I use Apple Mail and Address Book.

Cheers!

[jrafter]

Thunderbird is really worth a serious try. It's stable, feature-rich, and constatntly being improved.

[icibaqu]

i like mail. it's HAWT

[PubGuy]

Entourage is nice because it is very close to Outlook, and both store all emails in a single monolithic file. When this file becomes corrupt, you loose it all. This happened to me a few times in my Windows days.

Mail on the other hand, stores all emails individually in subdirectories, so if a file does become corrupted, its only that one file. If you then use Calendar and Address Book instead of Entourage, you'll find a much more integrated solution with the rest of the Mac.

[macforray]

Go to the Mozilla site and download a copy of Thunderbird 1.0.6 and give it a try. I switched in January as a Windoze user from Outlook. I early August I purchased my first Mac (Mini) and stuck with Thunderbird. I have played around with both Mail and Entourage and still like Thunderbird the best. My opinion only so just give it a try. Mail does come in second on my list.

[SSharon]

Originally Posted by jrafter

Thunderbird is really worth a serious try. It's stable, feature-rich, and constatntly being improved.

Just updated recently. I have tried it out a few times and always went back to Mail, this time I think I'm staying with Thunderbird.

[midwinter]

I had to quit using Mail with Tiger because of the "loading message" issue where it takes upwards of a minute to display even the most basic email message. I switched to Entourage, which I found annoying. Then to Thunderbird. The new 1.5 beta is very nice and adds in-line spell checking.

[kingjules]

Go for mail, I have switched from outlook (PC Vercion) and it's easy to use, nice interface and reliable as well. Go for it!

[Maflynn]

Mail works for me, but to be honest my home email needs are quite modest so I'm not one of those people who push the envelope - if there is such a thing for email

[Thinine]

Mail >>>> *

[zl9600]

after years on outlook express for mac, then entourage, i switched to mail this june. i have to say that as a visual person, i really am not a fan of mail, but am sticking with it because of the integration with the address book and ical.

the biggest problem i have with mail is the inline attachments. what a pain.

[kingjules]

agreed with you. using mail is the best thing if you want to use the full service tiger offers (with iCal, address book and so on). and if there is some stuff that don't work properly, at least we are using it and maybe by doing so, Apple will improve it even faster

[PHYMAC]

I use mail, and have only used mail, but do find it at time to be slow either when loading a message, or downloading something, but most of the time it is actually pretty good and reliable.

Originally Posted by kingjules

agreed with you. using mail is the best thing if you want to use the full service tiger offers (with iCal, address book and so on). and if there is some stuff that don't work properly, at least we are using it and maybe by doing so, Apple will improve it even faster

[jdc45]

Thurderbird is what I use, I have tried Mail, its a good program but Thunderbird is just so much better.

[Harvey]

Couldn't agree with you more.

[Thinine]

Couldn't agree with both of you less. Thunderbird is a nasty Mac app.

[Timo]

I personally like mail, which I've used since getting rid of entourage

[Cold Warrior]

glad some of you like thunderbird. I think it is crap.
I use entourage.

[zerostar]

Like others I used entourage to connect to the exchange server at work, I lost my DB 3 times but luckily had backups of most of it.

With my last corrupt DB I lost a special letter from a friend who passed, after that I switched to mail and have been using it since 10.3. With mail in 10.4 It has been an awesome upgrade and I just use the outlook web mail server to run my exchange stuff from home.

[phytonix]

Mail is good. But if you use Opera to browse, Opera M2 is quite good. Built in the browser, fast. And Opera has its Contacts too, which will automaticly import from Address Book. You can have a try.