Podcast: MacNotables email client shoot-out
In a recent MacNotables podcast, Adam Engst (TidBITS publisher), Andy Ihnatko, Dan Frakes, and Chuck Joiner discuss what they like and don’t like about their current and past email clients.
They discuss Eudora, Mail, Entourage, PowerMail, Mailsmith, Gmail, and even Elm.
The promo on the podcast’s web page reads:
Think that the choice of email clients is easy? Think again. The MacNotables ride into town on their favorite email clients and you’ll be surprised at what programs get the nod and why. Should you use the free option? Pay for a stand alone program? Use part of a productivity suite? Switch to web mail? There are no obvious answers but the panel gives you some things to consider and talk about where they would like to see email go in this bonus-length session.
The MacNotables podcast, I read on its web site 
, is “the podcasting home to some of the Macintosh industry’s best known and most visible personalities”.
It was interesting to hear of plans to rewrite Eudora completely from the ground up. Too late, methinks, although not everyone will agree.
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Tags: Apple Mail, email, entourage, Eudora, GMAIL, mail.app, Mailsmith, powermail, review
April 12th, 2006 at 3:43 am
I’m a big fan of Eudora. Because of…
inertia. I’ve been using it forever.
No, I’m a big fan of it because it’s the only client I know of that lets me edit incoming mail. I’m on a number of mailing lists, which as we all know generate more noise than signal. Because of this ratio, I typically get them in digest form (lots of messages compiled into one e-mail). Most digests can be deleted wholesale. A few I edit so as to preserve the good stuff. And neither Apple Mail nor Mailsmith let me do that.
Even in a non-digest situation, it’s worth being able to edit down messages for your archives, since there may be extraneous material or excessive quoting. And I’ve edited “here’s your password” e-mails to reflect the password I changed to rather than the automatically-generated one.
So as soon as another app lets me edit, I’ll consider leaving Eudora.
April 12th, 2006 at 3:46 am
Does this suggestion work for you in Mail? I hate to think of you trapped in an Eudora world ;-)
April 12th, 2006 at 4:02 am
I had seen that, and it looked awkward and treacherous. I guess Redirect will sort of keep the original “From” though it adds a Resent-To — and in my case also signed and encrypted it (making a test message about 9x larger!). It also changes the date.
I just want a Message > Edit command.
April 12th, 2006 at 4:03 am
Fair enough. I tried.
April 12th, 2006 at 7:44 am
Emacs-based mail clients have that capability.
I’d really like an “undigestify message” command in Apple Mail. Kind of surprised no one’s written a plugin for that by now.
In the mean time, you could use Message > Redirect [shift-commmand-E], edit content (including the Subject), send that editing message to desired recipient(s), and delete the original. That’ll add a some Resent-* and envelope headers to the new message but replies will honor the original sender/recipient(s) headers. And you can set up rules that match those redirected messages.
I prefer that method of editing messages to directly modifying the originals, although I don’t even remember the last time I’ve done it. I could easily be wasting too much time trimming excess noise from archived mail. Instead, I’d rather save plain text versions in a DEVONthink database (and elsewhere) for editing/archival outside the mail system.
April 12th, 2006 at 7:54 am
Oh, now I see Message > Redirect mentioned in a comment Tim linked to (broken link, btw).
I’ll listen to the MacNotables podcast later, although it’ll be disappointing if Mulberry and mutt are overlooked while “even Elm” gets mentioned. ;-)
April 12th, 2006 at 8:12 am
How weird. The link is working fine for me.
April 12th, 2006 at 6:17 pm
That link’s working okay here now, too. Pretty sure I first tried opening it in NetNewsWire, where I’ve occasionally noticed temporary “not found” errors with other links as recently as earlier today. Sorry for the false alarm; I’ll be sure to double-check if/when it happens again.
April 12th, 2006 at 6:27 pm
No worries. It is usually my fault afterall ;-)
April 13th, 2006 at 8:51 am
In regards to editing incoming emails, I understand that in Tiger Mail, each email is simply an individual text file, somewhat did Maildir is. Certainly, you could editing the message with a plain text editor outside of Mail, if nothing else (although if you messed with it’s headers, you would probably need to rebuild Mail’s database).
April 15th, 2006 at 11:29 am
“So as soon as another app lets me edit, I’ll consider leaving Eudora.”
Entourage also lets you edit incoming messages (Message -> Edit Message).
P.S. Found this discussion via MacNotables Web search RSS from Google ;-)
April 15th, 2006 at 11:54 am
Jeff: While the mail is readable with a text editor, it’s not strictly text. The .emlx looks like it begins with a character count, then the message, then XML. So any editing would require revising the count, which would be a huge pain.
Dan: I was sorta worried that a Microsoft product would turn out to be what I’m looking for… I don’t know if I’m ready for that.