Switchers in heaven and hell
Pedro Figueiredo has dumped Mail.app 
and switched to Entourage at work.
He finds the look of his new email client hard on the eyes (“ffs microsoft, did you employ a colour-blind guy to do that?”) and misses Mail’s search abilities. It’s “giving in to the Dark Side”, he says, only half in jest.
Bryce Zabel just switched to Macs after 20 years of PC use.
He started off using Entourage, because it was part of Office for Mac. But then he realised “that I was holding onto the old ways and if I was going Apple then, dammit, I was going in all the way. Now I use Mail, iCal and Address Book and, for me, I honestly do like them better.” He’s in heaven.
Similar Posts:
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- Mail.app vs the “new” Entourage
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- Resources for Apple Mail newcomers
Tags: Address Book, Apple Mail, entourage, iCal, iMac, mail.app, switching
March 3rd, 2006 at 8:01 am
I have to say I recently, reluctantly, dropped Mail.app for Thunderbird. The IMAP features of Mail.app are the worst I’ve ever seen, emails appearing multiple times and re-appearing after deletion. When Apple get it right again I’ll be the first to switch back again….
March 3rd, 2006 at 8:14 am
As an imapper, I’m severly tempted too sometimes, I must admit.
I just find that even with the IMAP annoyances, the combination of other things that I love about Mail.app still outweighs the pain.
Most of the time.
The crap IMAP support is such a common complaint that the Mail development team must be working on making it better. Surely.
March 3rd, 2006 at 9:47 am
You know, since all these articles, I dropped Mail.app for thunderbird, going on a month now… and to tell you the truth, it’s starting to suck as well. I’m getting a slow load drag on my IMAP accounts, and it has some annoying bugs that seem to be, of course, mac only…
Specifically, if anyone can tell me how to change the preferences to auto start responses above quotes text (with my signature), instead of below it, we’ll be friends forever!
March 3rd, 2006 at 11:16 am
Brady: Open the Config Editor displayed on the Advanced pane of Thunderbird’s preferences.
Find the string “mail.identity.default.reply_on_top” and change the value from “0″ to “1″.
Restart Thunderbird.
Works for me.
March 3rd, 2006 at 11:22 am
See Tim, we’re friends forever now — you’re a saint and a scholar, I would never have even thought to look in there in all my wildest toying with programs and IT; thank you!
March 3rd, 2006 at 11:28 am
I think you are too kind ;-)
Does that bring the signature with it, or do you need to play with the “mail.identity.default.sig_bottom” string? Or some other string?
There are various options at Tools > Account Settings > Composition and Addressing too, although they are greyed out for me, probably because I don’t store sigs in particular email clients any more. Storing them as snippets in Spell Catcher X or Textpander means that they are available in whatever client I’m using or even in web mail or forums.
March 4th, 2006 at 3:44 am
Yes, I had to turn that sig_bottom to false as well, so now it works well.
As a default, this guy doesn’t really store sigs so much as it just points to an html file. The suck part is thunderbirds HTML rendering is just as poor as mails rendering — not up to par with their browser by alteast 4 years (outlook, hotmail, even worse:( — only roundcube.net renders mail as the browser you’re viewing it does) — which means I have to use ugly, non standard code. Sigh…
May 2nd, 2006 at 2:59 am
Thank you Tim and Brady. A quick Google search for this exact issue with Thunderbird led me to this site, and you provided the fix! :-)