Andrew Escobar is an undergraduate student studying Finance and the developer of Mail Stamps 
(a utility that removes the bizarre lozenge-shaped buttons in Tiger Mail) and Front Row Enabler .
His first Mac was a Macintosh Classic, but he was primarily raised on a PC.
He switched to the Mac in 2001, using a trusty 700Mhz Power Mac Quicksilver. He now uses a 1.25Ghz PowerBook, which is to be replaced by a MacBook Pro in September.
HW: How long have you been using Mail.app?
AE: I began to use Mail when I switched to the Mac platform, after falling in love with the PowerBook G4 and Mac OS X.
I used Mail in conjunction with the web-based Yahoo Mail until my account began being inundated with spam. I’ve been using Mail exclusively since I purchased my PowerBook in September 2003. I’ve been very happy with Mail since, and it’s yet to really give me a reason to look elsewhere for another email client.
In my PC years I put up with Outlook and Outlook Express out of pure ignorance.
HW: What plugins and extensions do you use to make your email experience better?
AE: Without Mail Stamps , Mail would be completely unusable by me. Had I not been able to revert Mail’s new lozenge-like buttons introduced in Tiger, back to the beautifully crafted full-size icons used in Panther, I don’t think I could have continued to use Mail. It was just too big a pill to swallow. They are absolutely hideous, and I am still bewildered as to why some developer at Apple thought the change was a good idea.
Mail Attachments Iconizer is actually quite helpful. Instead of Mail trying to render and display a 16 page PDF within an email (which can sometime take forever), all my attachments are now displayed as icons instead.
I also use GPG Mail for those rare times when I need to encrypt my communications, and the recipient doesn’t use the S/MIME standard (which is built into Mail and Mac OS X).
HW: What’s your favourite thing about Mail.app?
AE: Mail is very well integrated with Mac OS X:
- I think I take Address Book’s integration for granted but things like displaying the sender’s picture for a quick visual cue is a nice touch.
- I added all my accounts to iChat, including Microsoft Messenger, because Mail conveniently shows if a contact is online and available for instant messaging, as opposed to emailing them.
- Spotlight is incredibly speedy in finding the exact email I need to reference, whether I’m using Mail or not.
- And while iPhoto isn’t really a part of Mac OS X, I appreciate the fact I can quickly move pictures from Mail to iPhoto with two clicks (I greatly prefer this over photocasting).
HW: What’s your pet hate about Mail.app?
AE:
- Those stupid, stupid lozenge-shaped buttons. Oh how I loathe them.
- Mail does not apply rules correctly to incoming mail in IMAP sub-folders. My university account is IMAP based and has a sub-folder called “spam-found.” While the spam filter does a perfect job of marking spam and moving it to this folder, I find it impossible to set up Mail to automatically mark these emails as read and delete them. This drives me crazy.
HW: If you could tell the Apple Mail development team one thing, what would it be?
AE: How about two things?
- Thank you.
- An option for a wide-screen setup would be nice, such that the mailboxes, list of messages, and the message preview are were positioned vertically. I connect my PowerBook to a 23 inch Cinema display when on campus, and it just seems silly to me that Mail can’t make use of the added pixel real-estate. There was an excellent Mail Widescreen Mockup posted on Flickr recently. While I’ve come close to reproducing this mockup with some hacking, my changes leave Mail very unstable.
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You can read other interviews with developers and Mac identities talking about their Mail.app experiences by following this tag cloud link.
[...] Talking Mail.app: Andrew Escobar [...]
“I added all my accounts to iChat, including Microsoft Messenger”
What exactly does this mean? I’d be more than interested to know how to do this. How can one add a Microsoft Messenger account to iChat?
I got to the end of the interview wondering exactly the same thing. I can’t find any reference elsewhere to cross-compatibility. Do you think he meant he packed up his MSN account and switched to iChat? Any chance you could send him a supplementary question about this?
I would also greatly appreciate, if you could ask him a follow-up question. And thanks a lot for providing these interesting interviews!
Hello,
iChat version 3 support Jabber, an open protocol and decentralized instant messaging standard that any server can add support for.
Wikipedia explains:
I’ll have a full write-up on the blog on the perfect way to connect to Messenger through iChat, and probably add a video tutorial. In the mean time, google the solution.
Jabber is a blessing — I just wanted to note I love your icons, It saved me from switching mail programs right away!
Thanks Andrew! This is great, I have tried it, although with differing results. For example, the online/offline status of contacts is not correctly displayed. A tutorial and server suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Let us know when you have written up something.