Does Apple’s Mail.app Stink?

Mario Viara says on August 8th, 2006 at 1:07 am

Brace yourself for an attack from the Mac faithful . Not only have you insulted Mail, you didn’t even give any reasons for it. It seems like you simply don’t like non-web based email clients

These are my reasons for not using webmail only.
* I need to send some email from my office address. Doing this through the webmail interface is a pain, as it is not as good as Gmail. Plus, it has only about 50 MB storage. As I don’t want to use an email client for office, and Gmail for personal, I ended up using the email client for both.
* Adding attachments is easy - drag and drop, or Copy/Paste. Those who like drag and drop may prefer having an app with a dock icon into which they can drop - can’t do that with webmail even if it supports drag and drop. Mail even previews all image attachments in the email while composing. I don’t know if GMail can do this, and any non-Web 2.0 like my office webmail definitely can’t.
* Offline access to email (getting less and less important as internet access becomes more ubiquitous, and one can always make offline backups of webmail).
* Smart folders (I don’t use it much, shouldn’t be hard to implement in Gmail if it doesn’t already have it).
* OS integration (with Address book, iPhoto).
* Check out Apple’s upcoming Time Machine feature, which will work in Mail 3. http://www.apple.com/macosx/le.....chine.html. It provides a very intuitive way to restore deleted emails. Hard to match this with webmail.
* Makes it easier to preview attachments. Don’t have to separately download them, they get downloaded with the mail.
* Easier to backup email (perhaps a non-issue with GMail, but not so with other webmail like my office webmmail).

Josh says on August 8th, 2006 at 1:08 am

Did you see the Leopard version of Mail? It looks to be GTD friendly. I’m sure in a matter of days del.icio.us will be teaming with blogs writing about how to tailor Mail to GTD. This looks like a promising solution.

Jan says on August 8th, 2006 at 1:59 am

I just use tiger mail and mail-act-on to run mailfilters with a touch of the button. Tiger Mail.app works nice if you keep your system simple. I keep my mail I still have to deal with. When I’m done with a mail, I select it, and press ctrl-a. Mail-act-on then runs a couple of mailfilters. If it is a bill, it puts it in a Bills folder, is it from a mailinglist, it puts it in another folder. Otherwise, just put it in an Archive folder.

Tomislav says on August 8th, 2006 at 3:01 am

No, it doesn’t stink. With the three-pane horizontal hack, Mail Act-On, MailTags and Smart folders it’s a productivity monster.

I have three Smart folders:

@Unread Inbox - Obvious, all emails not marked as read
@Action - For emails that take more than just a simple answer
@Hold - For emails that require that I wait for something

Then I go through my unread inbox and tag messages with Mail Act-on and Mailtags (@action and @hold tags). If it’s something really simple I just answer straight away.

I’ve used Gmail for about two years, but it just doesn’t cut it like the above setup when dealing with large amounts of email.

Peter says on August 8th, 2006 at 5:41 am

Opera’s M2 email client that comes with the Opera browser is by far the smartest email client I’ve seen. Oh, how I wished its autosaved live searches and its mailing lists handling would be implemented in Gmail… not to mention Active contacts…

Lucas says on August 8th, 2006 at 8:01 am

God, does Mail.app stink. It is the one thorn in my side since moving to a Mac. I have simply found no replacement whatsoever for Outlook. It lets me do everything I want to do, and more importantly it lets me do it the way I want. One other commenter mentioned the three-pane horizontal hack. That is one of the features I miss most about Outlook, but I found the Mail.app hack is totally useless, because when using it you can’t actually see enough information in the message list columns anymore. Argh!

Dave J. says on August 8th, 2006 at 8:20 am

Outlook’s filters are unreliable & Thunderbird’s spam filters aren’t effective enough.

I think most email-clients can be hacked to be more useful, but it would be nice to have one that you didn’t have to hack, or think about. Great subject for this blog, I’m all ears about a best-of-breed client.

My thought: Popping up dialog boxes for every function is a pain (i.e. to flag an email in Outlook). We really need an Ajax/ROR client. Are there any out there?

andrew says on August 8th, 2006 at 12:07 pm

I vote for mutt.

http://mutt.org/

“All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less.” -Jeremy Blosser, circa 1995

I have it on a machine connected to the Internet, it runs fetchmail, procmail and mutt. I can SSH in from anywhere and my mail is ready to go, all filtered and everything.

I don’t know about smart folders and whatnot, but I am on several lists and get ~800 emails a day and mutt is the only mail client I have tried that I have any chance of getting through my mail.

Oh, and composing mail in vim is just wonderful!

Lucas says on August 8th, 2006 at 5:44 pm

Dave, I agree that Outlook’s spam filters are not effective. I find they are, however, far superior out of the box to those in Mail.app. Luckily, the SpamBayes plugin for Outlook is almost supernaturally omniscient at filtering spam. I trained it once, and distinctly remember it letting through only two pieces of spam in over a year. Just drag a new button onto the toolbar in Outlook for flagging messages if you don’t like the dialog — there are buttons for each color. However, an Ajax mail client — no way! I simply don’t understand how anyone can use an interminably slow web-based application for something like email that you deal with for hours a day. Waiting five or ten seconds just to sort the list, or move from page to page, is a total waste of time, and very frustrating.

Conrad Benedict says on August 9th, 2006 at 8:07 am

I use Mail to access my Gmail and ISP Mail.

I find it’s Junk Mail learning mode, smart mailboxes, integrated picture slideshow mode and iPhoto integration, as well as picture sizing for outbound mail messages to be excellent.

I use Outlook on my PC and find it slow, cumbersome and just buggy (adding contacts and not getting fast links to work as I’d like etc).

Mail is the perfect home users mail app. The upcoming calendar etc integration will be much looked for though.

Conrad

atluii says on August 10th, 2006 at 2:01 am

Mutt - nothing beats it for hammering through tons of messages (I’m upwards of 1000 messages a day now, while running a 12-person software dev shop). It’s stayed with me on windows (ssh to a linux box), linux (use it directly and sync with unison to other computers for backup), mac (first thing I installed on the macbook pro). Tag, mass delete, Tag mass save to folder, tab completion, integration with address book. People talk about context switching between apps but really moving your hands from the keyboard to the mouse (or vice versa) costs you a ton of time.

Ditto vim!

atluii says on August 10th, 2006 at 2:01 am

Forgot to mention 2 kids and another on the way

pio says on August 11th, 2006 at 2:44 pm

Mutt + procmail + spamassasin. It is faster than any graphical mail client, has excellent filtering rules, and spamassasin does a great job. I am using it since years.

The one thing that makes Mail suck says on August 30th, 2006 at 11:17 pm

So, I TRIIIIIED Mail.app … I really really did. But I had to retreat to Thunderbird again. There’s a variety of weaknesses in Mail.app that just need to be handled.

1 - you can’t trigger rules without a third party app — hurrah, there’s a third party app — WHY is there a third party app? At this point in the game, having navigated multiple OS’s, shouldn’t the developers know that people want the functionality of “Mail ActOn” and just do it?

2 - this is a personal complaint, but I just can’t stand a mail app that doesn’t know how to differentiate between read/unread mail. Ok — before you reach for your torch — what I mean is in RULES. I tend to like to read my messages in my inbox, and when I’m done reading them, run rules on messages that are READ — thus shipping them away to their proper places and cleaning up my inbox.
I’ve tried setting up a smart folder, but you can’t set up one that’s only READ messages — you can only set up “unread” or “read since”…
read since makes sense — EXCEPT — if you make a message UNREAD again — it’s STILL caught in “read since” blech.
Ok … enough on THAT rant.
3 - it’s got a stupid name that makes it hard to search for support online. Mail.app helps … but C’MON! Let’s write something and call it “application” … or “software”.

Does it STINK? No … not so much … but I can’t use it because it doesn’t do Rules right.

Thunderbird, however DOES do rules well… a little bumpy, yes — but well.