Oh, the pain, the pain! IMAP in Mail.app
More reports of IMAP woes in Mail.app:
- Alan Gutierrez says that Apple Mail is just “too pitifully” slow
when seaching IMAP accounts, even when they are cached locally. - Thomas at BSDUNix says that Mail.app sucks — “You can’t subscribe to mailboxes and it’s awful slow with large imap mailboxes.”
- Although Paul Westbrook notes that Mail handles losing the IMAP connection well, he discovers two other quirks with IMAP in Mail.app — in copying nested IMAP folders and in using accounts that are over-quota.
End result? 66% user-drain to Thunderbird.
Tags: Apple Mail, folders, imap, mail.app, mailboxes, over-quota, searching, subscribing, thunderbirdRelated posts
January 12th, 2006 at 6:55 am
If Thunderbird handled a few things in a more elegant fashion (mainly ldap lookups) that matched Mail.app, I’d probably switch. But for now the lack of polish keeps me heading back to Mail.app (although it’s IMAP handling is abysmal it’s nowhere near as bad as Eudora, Entourage or Outlook 2003 on Windows).
January 30th, 2006 at 4:51 pm
I agree that Thunderbird could do LDAP a little better. I also agree that Apple Mail is just too slow to be a good IMAP client.
Speaking of address books and TBird, I know that a lot of people wish Thunderbird could use the wonderful Apple Address Book. If it did, they would be willing to switch back to Thunderbird.
Well, Thunderbird doesn’t support AAB yet, but Quicksilver does, and Quicksilver has (*SOME*) Thunderbird support. Set Thunderbird as your default e-mail app, hit Cntrl+Space, type in a name from your address book, tab over, type “Compose,” and Thunderbird will pop up in a compose window with that e-mail address.
The comma trick works too. Cntrl+Space, name, comma, name, comma, name, comma, …, tab, compose, and Thunderbird will pop up an e-mail addressed to each of those address book entries.
January 30th, 2006 at 5:14 pm
In fact the bugzilla feature request for Address Book intergration - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=203927- has been open for two and a half years without much sign of forward movement.
Neat tip though. Might blog it up as an entry of its own, if you don’t mind.
Would you call that “Thunderbird support” or is it really “Default email client support” (contingently TB in this case)?
January 30th, 2006 at 5:22 pm
Nearly every Thunderbird feature request is like that. I’m not convinced the whole “Bugzilla” concept even works. I think David Allen needs to get involved.
Well, technically the QuickSilver thing works just because you can assign Thunderbird as the default handler (”protocol helper”) for “mailto:”. QuickSilver sends a “mailto:blah@blah.com” to the operating system, the operating system looks up “mailto:” and calls up Thunderbird. So it’s really “Default e-mail client support.”
( side note: A long time ago I started using a neat Preference Pane calld “More Internet” — you can add, remove, and change any protocol and its helper. “smb” and “cifs” were not setup on my OS X system by default, so I added them and associated them with Finder. Now if I open “smb://windowsfileserver/share” in any application, Finder opens up that share automagically. Anyway, this gives you a way to shuffle all your default handlers around )
So I guess I would call it a sort of “Synergy of the Trinity: QuickSilver, Finder, and Thunderbird”… or something…