[Plant7575]

We have been using Netscape as our primary browser for a very long time (back at least to OS 7). Now that Netscape is no longer being updated, we have simply switched to using Safari for our browser. However, we have also been using Netscape as our email manager -- again for many years. I have discovered that OSX has a mail facility, but I don't know how good it is. What are the other alternatives to OSX Mail? What do most people use? What do you recommend?

Keep in mind that my wife is marginally computer savvy and likes a simple interface for email. She is comfortable with the Netscape mail interface, but does not like the look of Yahoo mail (which I know is not an email manager, but it is the only other email interface that she has seen -- our kids have yahoo email. accounts).

Thanks,

[mduell]

Yes, Apple releases a Mail client. It's not very good, particularly with IMAP servers.

Mozilla Thunderbird is another option that sucks less.

[Cold Warrior]

She could try Gmail webmail. However, like mduell said, Thunderbird doesn't suck as bad as Apple's Mail, although the interface isn't as polished.

Get SafariBlock for yourselves since you're using Safari. Save yourself and your wife the horror of Internet ads.

[ibook_steve]

I'm confused. Since when does Mail.app suck? It's full featured, extremely easy to use, and other than lousy *Exchange* support (never seen any IMAP problems with Mail), it works perfectly fine.

What I'm more surprised about is that 1somebody has still been using Netscape.

Steve

[mduell]

Originally Posted by ibook_steve 

I'm confused. Since when does Mail.app suck? It's full featured, extremely easy to use, and other than lousy *Exchange* support (never seen any IMAP problems with Mail), it works perfectly fine.

Doesn't offer a visual indication that it's checking/has checked when you hit "Get mail."
Doesn't support IMAP IDLE so you don't have to keep whacking the Get mail button.
Doesn't offer a horizontal 3 pane view; so much for making use of all these widescreens...
Doesn't mark sent mail as read when the sent folder is on IMAP.
Doesn't delete drafts after sending when the drafts folder is on IMAP.
Doesn't offer an easy way to manage or set priorities for the autocomplete list.
And on, and on...

[Cold Warrior]

It does offer IDLE support (at least Leopard's Mail version). However, it seems to take the account offline or put up the warning triangle if it loses the connection to the server over time. Thunderbird seems to ignore these periodic drops or corrects them, as continuous IDLE 'push' doesn't require any of my attention.

However, the lack of 3 pane view (except via a couple hacks); ridiculous 'on x date so and so wrote' reply headers; and buggy IMAP (e.g., populating the online Drafts folder with dozens of saved drafts for the same message) make it a crummy app for advanced users.

[mduell]

Originally Posted by Cold Warrior 

It does offer IDLE support (at least Leopard's Mail version). However, it seems to take the account offline or put up the warning triangle if it loses the connection to the server over time.

I'm running Mail 3.2 on Leopard and there's no IDLE love for me with a server that I know supports it.

Hopefully Thunderbird 3 will improve the polish of the interface, but I'm not terribly optimistic.

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by mduell 

Doesn't offer a visual indication that it's checking/has checked when you hit "Get mail."

Doesn't support IMAP IDLE so you don't have to keep whacking the Get mail button.

Doesn't offer a horizontal 3 pane view; so much for making use of all these widescreens...

Just double-click a message and it opens in a whole new window, which can take up as much or as little of the screen as you like.

Doesn't mark sent mail as read when the sent folder is on IMAP.

Doesn't delete drafts after sending when the drafts folder is on IMAP.

Doesn't offer an easy way to manage or set priorities for the autocomplete list.

This is the only point of yours that I'll have to grant. Do keep in mind, though, that the OP is used to using Netscape for mail and probably will not be too put off by the exclusion of this feature.

[turtle777]

Guys the OP is looking for a "mail facility", I think Apple Mail will be all he needs.

-t

[TETENAL]

Try Apple Mail. It does not suck.

[mduell]

Originally Posted by CharlesS

Doesn't offer a visual indication that it's checking/has checked when you hit "Get mail."

Sorry I forgot to mention IMAP for this one; progress only appears on a few of your accounts, are those POP?

Originally Posted by CharlesS

Doesn't support IMAP IDLE so you don't have to keep whacking the Get mail button.

It's a nice checkbox, but the feature doesn't actually work. I get mail on my blackberry (polling since we don't run BES) or on a coworkers treo (supports IMAP IDLE) that hasn't appeared in my inbox and won't until I hit get mail or wait for the polling interval.

Originally Posted by CharlesS

Doesn't offer a horizontal 3 pane view; so much for making use of all these widescreens...

Opening a message in a new window doesn't replace this and doesn't work for single-button reading.

Originally Posted by CharlesS

Doesn't mark sent mail as read when the sent folder is on IMAP.

Have you clicked on that message to mark it as read? Every message I send is marked as unread until I click on it.

Originally Posted by CharlesS

Doesn't delete drafts after sending when the drafts folder is on IMAP.

That's nice for you, it doesn't happen for me or the people I know. It also doesn't happen for every message, I'd estimate about half of them.

Originally Posted by CharlesS

Doesn't offer an easy way to manage or set priorities for the autocomplete list.

He's coming from crap so must be fine with crap? I don't think so.

[red rocket]

Gyaz Mail isn’t bad, either. Similar in ease of use to Apple Mail but with three panes, etc.

[angelmb]

Originally Posted by mduell 

Doesn't offer a horizontal 3 pane view; so much for making use of all these widescreens...

free Letterbox 0.22b - MacUpdate and free WideMail 0.5.1 - MacUpdate

[naphtali]

Another vote for Apple Mail

I've been using it since 10.0 since I didn't like how Entourage stored its messages (I know it's more stable now, but I'm really happy with Mail) and back then having the number of emails shown in the dock icon was pretty cool

I find Mail very likable - it's fast, stable and does everything I need it to. More importantly, it stores emails and attachments in open formats so you can easily back your stuff up or browse and retrieve items from Finder.


I've never had problems with
- Sent mail being marked as unread (why would it?)
- Draft messages remaining drafts after being sent
I don't know the specifics, but I've never had this problem on any platform/email account I've used, so perhaps these could be server-side configuration issues?


As for the rest
- Doesn't offer a visual indication that it's checking/has checked when you hit "Get mail."
Since day 1, there has been an additional activity window (Cmd+0) that you can call up to see what Mail is doing. Yes, I agree that it's not right in your face, but it's not hidden in a jungle of menus. Menubar: Window > Activity


- Doesn't support IMAP IDLE so you don't have to keep whacking the Get mail button.
I don't really know how this works - is it like push email? I don't need to check my email every second of the day, so I'm amply happy with automated checks every 10mins. I think the OP might be as satisfied too


- Doesn't offer a horizontal 3 pane view; so much for making use of all these widescreens...
I like the current interface. I find that it keeps things focused. I do know of people who are fans/used to the Outlook 3-pane look, and for that there's the plug-in angelmb mentioned

[wataru]

I've had the multiple-drafts-on-server issue, but only with Gmail. It saved a separate draft for almost every word I wrote. Very annoying. I ended up setting it to only save drafts locally.

[Plant7575]

Time out guys (and gals?). Remember me? The original poster?

Thanks for all the responses, but....

I'm sure that this discussion is very stimulating on your level. But I don't understand 90% of what you are arguing about. I'm too lazy to patch quotes together from the various posts to respond to, so I'll just summarize (in the order that things come to my head).

G-mail: Inappropriate. We like our current email service (and email address) with our ISP and don't want to change. It is a POP server.

Outlook's three-wide panes (or something like that). I've never used to Outlook. I haven't used non-macs since the DOS days (yes I know DOS, but not Windows). And I'm no fan of Microsoft, which is why I never used Explorer for Mac. So I don't know what this three-wide panes thing is that I am missing.

Draft messages -- I don't use this feature. If I want to compose a complex email, I do it in a word processor, where I have all my favorite editing short cuts available.

Autocomplete list -- no idea what this is. Perhaps it is like my email program at work, where I type in a few letters of the name of someone in my address book (or anybody at the university) and I get a list of names to choose from -- saves typing the whole name and saves time not having to go to a separate address list window. Netscape does that, but doesn't always catch the name you are looking for. Not sure if that is because of Netscape inadequacies or because we have clogged our email address book with 500 email addresses of an organization for which I was the membership chairman for 5 years.

IDLE -- never hear of it. Sounds like from your discussion that this is a way for the mail facility to keep automatically checking your mail all day long. As long as the Netscape mail window is open, we get beeps telling us that new emails have arrived (and automatically downloaded). But usually we don't leave Netscape open except when working on email. We tend to check our email once a day and deal with responses at that time. (We are not interested in becoming slaves to our email.) So this is not really that important a feature to us.

IMAP -- no clue

"Netsape is crap". No, just old. My philosophy on computers is that they are very useful tools to help me be more productive in the things that I want to do. I do not want to spend time learning the latest tricks that I don't really need. I don't want to spend my time on new learning curves every year or so with every program that I use. I tend to stick with a program until it fails to do what I need to do or until I read about newer versions or new programs with features that will really help me be more productive and are worth the learning curve (and in some cases the transfer of hundreds of files to new formats). So I use quite a few old programs. I am maintaining an older G3 as an OS 9 machine for those great old OS 9 programs that are no longer available.

It sounds so far like I should try Apple's Mail program, since the opinions are split about it and there does not seem to be widespread support for any of the alternatives. It is also very unlikely that Apple's Mail program will go extinct -- which could happen to some 3rd party programs. Stability is more important than the number of features.

[naphtali]

IMAP's just like POP, another protocol to access your email.

IMAP's advantage over POP is that messages, folders, read states etc can be left on the server, so that all devices that access the IMAP account have exactly the same folder layout and content.

POP clients tend to download all emails, unless you ask them to leave all messages on the server (and I think the read/unread state will not work). You'll also have to set up the folder structure on each client.

Since you use POP, this won't trouble you. However, because you use POP, you might have to find a way to export your old emails from Netscape and import them into Mail. I don't know how well Mail can do that, if at all, but it's worth a try. There might be 3rd party scripts/utilities that do that too.

As a side note, if your ISP supports IMAP, you might want to think of switching your email access from POP, as there are a lot of advantages to using IMAP (see above).



@wataru - Gmail's IMAP implementation seems to be rather non-standard - for e.g., look at their folder system vs labels. According to Google themselves, although you can link the labels to folders, this is not the standard IMAP folder system, and you'll get a copy of all the emails in your inbox.

I gave up labeling my emails after learning about this, so I don't know first-hand how true it is.

[MacosNerd]

I like apple's mail client and it does everything I need it to do.
I think mduell is in the minority believing that mail.app is deficient.

[Atheist]

Based on the OP's needs, I think Apple Mail will suit him fine.

[Plant7575]

Originally Posted by naphtali 

However, because you use POP, you might have to find a way to export your old emails from Netscape and import them into Mail. I don't know how well Mail can do that, if at all, but it's worth a try. There might be 3rd party scripts/utilities that do that too.

That will be the big issue. But I did manage to export those 500 email addresses that I spoke of to the next membership chairman. I simply had him export a few addresses as a text file to me, opened the exported file with Word, and examined it's structure. Then I exported the 500 addresses as a text file from Netscape, opened it with Word, modified the format to match the one sent to me (mostly adding and deleting returns to get the fields to line up), then sent the file to the new chairman. He had minimal corrections to make after importing the file. I am pretty handy using Word and Excel to modify files (I learned how to do that when most file formats were not interchangeable), and I believe that I documented the protocol that I developed somewhere, so I should be able to use a similar strategy to export the emails and addresses to Apple Mail.

Originally Posted by naphtali 

As a side note, if your ISP supports IMAP, you might want to think of switching your email access from POP, as there are a lot of advantages to using IMAP.

One thing at a time. I'll change over using the same protocol and make sure that everything works. Then I might investigate the advantages of switching protocols -- assuming that this is an option.

Thanks, for all the input.

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by Plant7575 

It sounds so far like I should try Apple's Mail program.

Absolutely the right decision. You will love Apple Mail. It does all you need it for, and does it well.

These "advanced features" that some were talking about don't apply to you. Enjoy Mail.

-t

[bishopazrael]

OP.... wise choice. Apple mail will handle all your needs very easily and swiftly.

This whole thread reminds me of Clint..."we move fast, we move silent, we move deadly. Anymore than one shake of those wangs constitutes pleasure, ladies...and that's not what we're here for."

Good job to all in getting the OP fixed on a new course. Plant, if you have any problems feel free to drop by any time.
Bishop

[naphtali]

@Plant - Just poked around, and it looks like Mail has an option to import Netscape/Mozilla Mailboxes. If that fails, I think you should be able to export as mbox or Eudora, which Mail also support.

I don't know if using Word or Excel to edit those files is a good idea. They may open the file ok but might also add extra metadata/formatting information that make the file unusable for other programs. A very basic text-editor like TextEdit (set to plain text only) might be safer. Then again, you're the expert at these things!

By the way, the address portion is handled AddressBook.app, which imports
1) vCards
2) LDIF
3) Text Files
4) Apple's own Address Book Archive.

Good luck! Enjoy Mail and the comfort that your mail won't be locked in a proprietary format

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by mduell 

Sorry I forgot to mention IMAP for this one; progress only appears on a few of your accounts, are those POP?

Nope, I only have one POP account, all the rest are IMAP. The progress indicator shows up for all accounts, POP and IMAP, but it is so fast checking the accounts that the indicator is only there for a very short time. All of the accounts got the spinner - the three at the top were the ones that were still spinning by the time I hit Command-Shift-4, possibly because the top two have by far the most messages in them. It was actually a tricky thing to screenshot.

Maybe Apple Mail is just too fast for you, and you don't notice it's working.

It's a nice checkbox, but the feature doesn't actually work. I get mail on my blackberry (polling since we don't run BES) or on a coworkers treo (supports IMAP IDLE) that hasn't appeared in my inbox and won't until I hit get mail or wait for the polling interval.

Maybe something's wrong with your server. I was playing with this yesterday afternoon, before I found this thread. I was doing a video chat with someone and I could hear the "whoosh" sound each time the other person sent me an e-mail, and each time it would show up in my inbox instantaneously. So it does work in at least some circumstances. If it's not working for you, try filing a bug report with Apple. If it's indeed a bug, it'll probably be fixed by a Software Update soon enough, so it probably isn't a big consideration in a long-term decision about what mail program to use (notwithstanding the fact that the OP doesn't care about IDLE support).

Opening a message in a new window doesn't replace this and doesn't work for single-button reading.

To each his (or her) own. I myself hate the Microsoft "everything crammed into one window, every window filling the whole screen" approach, and always turn the "in-window editing" feature off in any app I find that has it, whether Mail, Xcode, or anything else. I prefer my mail window only large enough to display the relevant metadata for each message in the list, and no larger. The OP doesn't seem to care about this either.

Have you clicked on that message to mark it as read? Every message I send is marked as unread until I click on it.

No, I didn't, and I don't think I've ever seen a message in the Sent box show up as unread while using Apple Mail (which I've used since the first version that came with 10.0).

Perhaps I should have made a screenshot of the Sent folder from one of the accounts I actually send messages from, so you could see how they're all marked as read. I just didn't want to go to the trouble of blanking out all those recipients.

That's nice for you, it doesn't happen for me or the people I know. It also doesn't happen for every message, I'd estimate about half of them.

Again, I've never seen this problem, all the way back to 10.0. Drafts get deleted when you send them, unless there's a problem that keeps them from being sent (your Internet connection goes down, your server is acting up, etc.).

I send a lot of e-mails, so if this issue were real, my Drafts folder would be absolutely bloated. It's empty (my Sent folder would also be full of unread messages if that problem were legit).

Perhaps you need to trash your preference file or something.

He's coming from crap so must be fine with crap? I don't think so.

I think the OP would be quite happy with Apple Mail. It's a nice e-mail client, and certainly isn't "crap." It also doesn't seem to have most of the issues you are claiming.

[Ted L. Nancy]

Originally Posted by mduell 

Doesn't offer a horizontal 3 pane view; so much for making use of all these widescreens...

Get WideMail.

As far as the other issues you listed go, I've never noticed those "shortcomings," nor have I had event to desire those features.

Three (far more elementary) shortcomings I've experienced with Mail.app and suggestions I would make to the Mail.app devs are:

1. Ability to set a permanent reply-to address for accounts.

2. Integrate color-codes for .Mac email aliases into the app.

3. Synchronize (for real) user signatures in Mail.app with .Mac webmail signatures.

OP, you seem to be an average Yahoo Mail guy. Mail.app will work just great for you.

[peeb]

Mail is a great email client for casual use. It does not suck, but does lack some enterprise level features.

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by Ted L. Nancy 

1. Ability to set a permanent reply-to address for accounts.

What's the purpose of that ?

Why not set that reply-address as the main email address in that account ?

-t

[mduell]

Originally Posted by angelmb 

free Letterbox 0.22b - MacUpdate and free WideMail 0.5.1 - MacUpdate

I know hacks exist. That doesn't make them a good idea.

Originally Posted by naphtali 

I've never had problems with
- Sent mail being marked as unread (why would it?)
- Draft messages remaining drafts after being sent
I don't know the specifics, but I've never had this problem on any platform/email account I've used, so perhaps these could be server-side configuration issues?

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

Maybe something's wrong with your server. I was playing with this yesterday afternoon, before I found this thread. I was doing a video chat with someone and I could hear the "whoosh" sound each time the other person sent me an e-mail, and each time it would show up in my inbox instantaneously. So it does work in at least some circumstances. If it's not working for you, try filing a bug report with Apple. If it's indeed a bug, it'll probably be fixed by a Software Update soon enough, so it probably isn't a big consideration in a long-term decision about what mail program to use (notwithstanding the fact that the OP doesn't care about IDLE support).

It's possible that all the other mail clients/devices I've tried are in a conspiracy to operate in a way that's not complaint with the standard... or just that Mail.app is broken.

Originally Posted by naphtali 

As for the rest
- Doesn't offer a visual indication that it's checking/has checked when you hit "Get mail."
Since day 1, there has been an additional activity window (Cmd+0) that you can call up to see what Mail is doing. Yes, I agree that it's not right in your face, but it's not hidden in a jungle of menus. Menubar: Window > Activity

Cool; now why doesn't that same activity show up in the "Mail Activity" portion below all the mail folders.

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

Nope, I only have one POP account, all the rest are IMAP. The progress indicator shows up for all accounts, POP and IMAP, but it is so fast checking the accounts that the indicator is only there for a very short time. All of the accounts got the spinner - the three at the top were the ones that were still spinning by the time I hit Command-Shift-4, possibly because the top two have by far the most messages in them. It was actually a tricky thing to screenshot.

Maybe Apple Mail is just too fast for you, and you don't notice it's working.

After following naphtali's suggestion above, I found a way to display the activity. It's certainly not too fast for me to notice and there's no spinning icon by any folder while the progress bars are going in the Activity window, .

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

No, I didn't, and I don't think I've ever seen a message in the Sent box show up as unread while using Apple Mail (which I've used since the first version that came with 10.0).

Behold.

[CharlesS]

Mduell, I think something is wrong with your copy of Mail, because I've never noticed those issues on any OS X machine I've ever seen (and, apparently, neither do the others in this thread either). Like I suggested before, you should try trashing your preference files, caches, and other support files for Mail, as well as removing any third-party hacks, APE modules, InputManager hacks, etc. that you have installed. The things you describe certainly aren't common.

If I had a copy of Snapz or something, I'd make you a movie showing how it typically works.

[Big Mac]

The only gripe that I have with Mail that mduell identified is the need to manually click Get Mail to get my .Mac mail. It refuses to fetch it automatically. I don't have this problem with regular POP accounts.

[turtle777]

I get the same Drafts folder bloating as mduell gets.

I suspect it only happens to some IMPA servers, probably a config issue.
But I'm with mduell: Mail should handle that better, even IF it's a server issue.

-t

[naphtali]

I think we're all way beyond the OP's needs! But just for the sake of discussion,


@bigmac - Are you talking about push email, or just checks at intervals? I don't think push email works on vanilla POP either, and the second is a standard feature that just works.
There are rumours that there will be a .Mac refresh soon with some nice Exchange style functionality like push email, so hopefully everybody will be happy after that


@mduell - If you phrase it that way, it certainly sounds ludicrous. However, many of us have not had this problem, and I honestly haven't seen this with Mail, Outlook, Entourage, Eudora etc. Could be server side, something you set, or perhaps a conspiracy after all

As for the Mail Activity corner displaying less information, I should think that this is by design. You know how Apple is with trying to keep things simple. I think most users are happy enough knowing
1) that their email program checks every 10 mins
2) that their mail is being sent (from the Mail Activity)
3) that their email is being checked (twirling progress circles thingies beside your mailbox names)


@ted - You could probably set up rules pretty quickly to colour the messages according to the addresses they are sent to (i.e. your various aliases):
If [To] Is Equal To [[email protected]], Set colour ...


@turtle & @mduell - It sounds like Mail might not be getting notifications from the IMAP server on the email being sent or something. What I observe with .Mac (through the activity corner) is that after clicking send, the message is copied over to the sent folder. Perhaps there's a missing link somewhere such that Mail doesn't know what's going on.

[naphtali]

Originally Posted by turtle777 

What's the purpose of that ?
Why not set that reply-address as the main email address in that account ?
-t

Maybe Ted L Nancy wants to sound like he/she has a secretary

Original email to [email protected]
Reply with [email protected]

Dear Mr President, Ted is unavailable right now. He's fighting some bad guys over in Afghanistan. (=playing XBox)

[Rumor]

I used Mail.app and Gmail for about two days via IMAP. Quite funky, clunky, and not at all nice to use. Every single piece of mail, be in sent or received, landed in my inbox. Things could not be permanently taken from the inbox and put into its own folder, messages had issues being deleted, the sent box and draft boxes had the same messages, all in all, quite annoying.

[CharlesS]

Gmail used to do some of that to me (and only Gmail, not other IMAP accounts), but it hasn't lately. I think I turned off some setting to get the outgoing mail to stop showing up in my inbox, but I don't see any such setting anymore, so it could have be that they just fixed the way it worked on the server end to make it work more like a normal IMAP server.

At any rate, Gmail's working fine for me these days.

[naphtali]

Originally Posted by Rumor 

I used Mail.app and Gmail for about two days via IMAP. Quite funky, clunky, and not at all nice to use. Every single piece of mail, be in sent or received, landed in my inbox. Things could not be permanently taken from the inbox and put into its own folder, messages had issues being deleted, the sent box and draft boxes had the same messages, all in all, quite annoying.

I've read that the Gmail IMAP implementation is non-standard. It's not using the standard IMAP functions.

If you notice, and if I'm right, there really isn't a real folder system in the web interface. Everything is in conversations in your inbox, and even though you could give messages labels, a copy of everything remains in your inbox.

The general idea behind getting some sort of folder structure with Mail and Gmail would be to map Mail folders to Gmail labels. However, I think you will still end up with duplicates in your inbox.

Some links:
Gmail's Buggy IMAP Implementation | The Good Life...
How do actions sync in IMAP?
macosxhints.com - A better Gmail IMAP to Mail.app sync
How-to: Proper Gmail IMAP for iPhone & Apple Mail


I don't get these problems with my .Mac or university mail, both with IMAP and Mail

[frdmfghtr]

Originally Posted by Plant7575 

Time out guys (and gals?). Remember me? The original poster?

Thanks for all the responses, but....

I'm sure that this discussion is very stimulating on your level. But I don't understand 90% of what you are arguing about. I'm too lazy to patch quotes together from the various posts to respond to, so I'll just summarize (in the order that things come to my head).

First, welcome to the MacNN Forums!

What you did and probably didn't realize is that you asked what I think of as a "Coke vs. Pepsi" question regarding Mail. Some (like me) like it over anything else, and some despise it (as I'm sure you have noticed) with little ground in between. Either way, LOTS of discussion will come up---look at all the responses your initial question generated in 24 hours!

I used to use Thunderbird Mail but migrated over to Apple Mail because it was very easy to use all the contacts with the Apple Address Book and keeping things synced with my iPhone (which I don't think is an issue for you). When I set my parents up with a Mac, I also set up Apple Mail as their mail program. My dad, who had very little computer experience before retiring, is able to use it quite easily.

Since both are free, you can try both out with not-too-much pain and see which one you like better. The only little bit of trouble you might have is moving email form one to the other once you decide which one to use, but that's not too hard to do and can be dealt with later if needed.

Good luck!

[zro]

mduell, are these unread draft and sent messages not messages generated by you?

[wataru]

Originally Posted by naphtali 

@wataru - Gmail's IMAP implementation seems to be rather non-standard - for e.g., look at their folder system vs labels. According to Google themselves, although you can link the labels to folders, this is not the standard IMAP folder system, and you'll get a copy of all the emails in your inbox.

I gave up labeling my emails after learning about this, so I don't know first-hand how true it is.

Yeah, I know about that. No, that's not at all what I'm talking about. This was a separate draft saved for the same message at intervals approximately corresponding to every word I entered into the message in Mail. That shouldn't have anything to do with labels (which I like and continue to use with no problems), though I haven't seen this "multiple drafts" problem with IMAP services other than Gmail (though my only other email is .Mac).

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by ibook_steve 

I'm confused. Since when does Mail.app suck? It's full featured, extremely easy to use, and other than lousy *Exchange* support (never seen any IMAP problems with Mail), it works perfectly fine.

What I'm more surprised about is that 1somebody has still been using Netscape.

Steve

It's far from full-featured, it's actually extremely lightweight on features.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by mduell 

Doesn't offer a visual indication that it's checking/has checked when you hit "Get mail."
Doesn't support IMAP IDLE so you don't have to keep whacking the Get mail button.
Doesn't offer a horizontal 3 pane view; so much for making use of all these widescreens...
Doesn't mark sent mail as read when the sent folder is on IMAP.
Doesn't delete drafts after sending when the drafts folder is on IMAP.
Doesn't offer an easy way to manage or set priorities for the autocomplete list.
And on, and on...

It does support IDLE, but:

- It's extremely chatty, constantly doing things like getting unread message count, randomly syncing/rebuilding folders that haven't changed, downloading messages it has already downloaded, and in doing so causing great stalls to the entire app while it spins its wheels doing nothing (it does this on multiple machines for me too)

- No folder subscription support

- No multiple identity support

- No control over which folders are checked for new mail

- Only extensible through hacks

- Notes is also extremely slow, as is RSS, mark all messages as read, etc.

- Chews up a lot of CPU constantly

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

Mduell, I think something is wrong with your copy of Mail, because I've never noticed those issues on any OS X machine I've ever seen (and, apparently, neither do the others in this thread either). Like I suggested before, you should try trashing your preference files, caches, and other support files for Mail, as well as removing any third-party hacks, APE modules, InputManager hacks, etc. that you have installed. The things you describe certainly aren't common.

If I had a copy of Snapz or something, I'd make you a movie showing how it typically works.

I can attest to the fact that the unread message indicators are extremely buggy, and when I used Mail my drafts folder was constantly littered with stuff too.

Mail's interface design is great, but it is extremely buggy, scales quite poorly with large mailboxes, and is extremely inefficient.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by turtle777 

I get the same Drafts folder bloating as mduell gets.

I suspect it only happens to some IMPA servers, probably a config issue.
But I'm with mduell: Mail should handle that better, even IF it's a server issue.

-t

It's not a config issue. I think it is something to do with all of the connections Mail opens up with the IMAP server (i.e. way too many), perhaps being severed or timing out.

In short, Mail is buggy.

[besson3c]

IDLE support is not push email. IDLE support is leaving a connection to the server open, and receiving notifications by the server of new email messages. I haven't figured out the problem with IDLE in Mail, but it definitely doesn't work properly... Considering the larger pattern here, I would guess that it is another buggy Mail "feature".

[TETENAL]

Originally Posted by besson3c 

- No folder subscription support

Mail 3.0 Help: Subscribing to public and shared folders

IDLE works fine as far as I can tell. I have Mail set to never check for new mail and I'm still getting them as far as I can tell. Without pressing the "Get Mail" button (which gives audible feedback by the way – another criticism I can't follow). No performance problem for me either.

[Gankdawg]

I would probably move to mail full-time, save for one thing: I still can't send photos to Windows users without Mail attaching extra files. I've tried 'Windows friendly attachments' and everything else I can think of. Why can't I simply email 5 photos to friends and family and they receive 10 attachments?

[TETENAL]

I have been mailing images to Windows users without any problems since ever (or when Mail was first shipped with OS X).

[Gankdawg]

Originally Posted by TETENAL 

I have been mailing images to Windows users without any problems since ever (or when Mail was first shipped with OS X).

I've tried with every succession of OS X and it has never worked for me.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by TETENAL 

Mail 3.0 Help: Subscribing to public and shared folders

IDLE works fine as far as I can tell. I have Mail set to never check for new mail and I'm still getting them as far as I can tell. Without pressing the "Get Mail" button (which gives audible feedback by the way – another criticism I can't follow). No performance problem for me either.

I'm aware of the subscription interface, but this does not work your own local folders, nor does it work namespaces outside of INBOX.*

I have well over 20,000 messages in my accounts, and Mail is an absolute insufferable disaster performance wise in just about every way. Being able to unsubscribe from some of my archived mail folders would help a great deal.

[peeb]

Works for me too.