Leander Kahney is the managing editor of Wired News 
. He writes the Cult of Mac blog , and is author of two books about Mac and iPod culture: Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod .
HW: What kind of Mac do you use?
LK: At work I use a dual-processor Power Mac G5 (2Ghz, I think) with a couple of old CRT monitors. It’s got 2Gbytes of RAM and is nice and fast. At home, I have an original 1.6 Ghz Power Mac G5. I thought it was fast — three years ago.
I also have a G4 PowerBook (aluminum 1.25GHz) and a G4 iBook, which my wife and kids use. (There’s also several stashed away we no longer use — a G3 PowerBook, an eMac, a couple of bondi-blue iMacs, two classic compact Macs, etc). At home I’m glued to the PowerBook. I can no longer watch TV without also surfing the Web or doing email; and almost all my reading these days is electronic.
HW: How long have you been using Mail.app? What other clients have you used (and why did you stop)?
LK: I use Mail.app at home and have done since it was released. I was also a devoted user of Mail.app at work, until about six months ago when I returned from a week-long break and had about 35,000 email messages waiting for me, most of it spam. Mail.app choked on the load, and so did MS Entourage, Mailsmith and others I tried. Only Mozilla’s Thunderbird could cope, so I switched.
I haven’t been really happy with it though until I discovered a Mail.app theme called Crossover . Now it’s just like using Mail.app, except there’s no built-in spell checker or .Mac syncing.
HW: What plugins and extensions do you use to make your email experience better?
LK: I don’t use any. I tried SpamSieve but could never get it to work right — probably because I was too lazy to train it properly.
HW: What’s your favourite thing about Mail.app?
LK: It’s very clean and straightforward. Spotlight support is superb. And compared to Thunderbird, set-up is a breeze. Thunderbird has some arcane options and inconvenient defaults — like a global inbox, or defaulting to POP instead of IMAP– that tripped me up a couple of times. I also like .Mac syncing. I use about four different machines, and keeping the accounts synchronized has been a blessing.
HW: What’s your pet hate about Mail.app?
LK: The icon for creating a new message — I always, always hit the Get Mail button, because that’s what a New message button should look like.
HW: If you could tell the Apple Mail development team one thing, what would it be?
LK: Switch the New Message and Get Mail icons.
