Comments on: Mail.app: So long, farewell, aufwiedersehen, goodbye

By: Tim

Tim — Thu, 11 May 2006 03:28:18 +0000

Perhaps I sounded too bolshie. If so, apologies.

Of course, you do need to take what you can get. Personally, I like Thunderbird a lot. Just not quite as much :)

By: Ted Pavlic

Ted Pavlic — Thu, 11 May 2006 03:22:26 +0000

Where are the MailTags and Mail Act-on for Thunderbird, or the variety of notification extensions that produce such pretty and informative alerts, or – due to the lack of applescriptability in Thunderbird – the scores of scripts offering user-customisable options that Thunderbird users can only dream of?

Where is the IMAP tag support in Mail.app? Heck, while we’re at it, where is the realistic IMAP support in Mail.app?

And Thunderbird scripts are just JavaScripts… It’s just too bad that the bundle they come in makeks them inaccessible to most users who aren’t very curious. Additionally, as you point out, there’s no Apple Script support. If there was, Mail.app would have a competitor. But I mentioned that… The biggest thing that Tbird lacks are OS X developers.

If Mail.app didn’t have such crappy IMAP support, I’d be there… Meanwhile though… I just have to make do with Thunderbird. (didn’t you have a quote on recently about a relationship with a mail client is a complex one where you just take what you can get?)

By: Tim

Tim — Thu, 11 May 2006 03:16:47 +0000

Hmmm… What kind of formatting? Hawk Wings accepts almost anything, AFAIK.

Golly, Lucida Grande looks awful in italics :(

By: Steve Collins

Steve Collins — Thu, 11 May 2006 03:11:34 +0000

That’s annoying. I had a bunch of nice formatting in there and it’s vanished. Sorry about subsequent unformatted readability.

By: Steve Collins

Steve Collins — Thu, 11 May 2006 03:09:34 +0000

I too am considering ditching Mail.app for a number of reasons. In no particular order:

I have to use an Exchange server at work, and can get Entourage to connect to its Outlook Web Access (OWA) service with no hassles. Mail.app on the other hand…for the past couple of weeks, Mail.app has been drifting off into “beachball Hell” as I reach (scroll or click) the last message in my Inbox. This is fairly consistent and requires a Force Quit and restart to sort itself out.my very strong preference would be to use a single tool of each type to manage my email, calendar and contacts. Entourage’s “takeover” approach is unappealing.

The thing that’s keeping me bound to Mail.app is its comfortable and useful connectedness to things like Address Book, iCal and kGTD, both of which I rely on heavily. If I could get iCal syncing with multiple calendars from Entourage a la kGTD, rather than the all-or-nothing “Entourage” calendar, I’d be using Entourage in a second.

All that said, Mail.app is still my preference by a long stretch. If only I could solve my issues and have it play nice with OWA.

By: Tim

Tim — Thu, 11 May 2006 02:42:14 +0000

Sure. I thought about that as I was writing. I like to play fair.

But then I decided, Mail’s edge is not just about the numbers of plugins; it’s about quality.

Where are the MailTags and Mail Act-on for Thunderbird, or the variety of notification extensions that produce such pretty and informative alerts, or – due to the lack of applescriptability in Thunderbird – the scores of scripts offering user-customisable options that Thunderbird users can only dream of?

By: Ted Pavlic

Ted Pavlic — Thu, 11 May 2006 02:37:59 +0000

Thunderbird has an abundance of plugins. It doesn’t seem fair to say that the plugins for Mail makes it unparalleled… I know Tbird has its problems, but it at least parallels Mail.app in plugin support (if not surpasses it!).

What Tbird doesn’t have is an abundance of OS X developers eager to make it a real competitor… Oh well…