Thunderbird vs. Mail.app shootout
Ashish Gulhati, CEO of email service provider Neomailbox 
, decided to dump Mail and give Thunderbird another try.
At first glance, he was impressed with the improvements since he last used it twelve months ago.
He even got inspired enough to list Thunderbird’s pros and cons. In short, he concluded, the Mozilla client “sure seemed to surpass Mail.app in terms of bleeding edge features.”
Then the rot set in and Thunderbird’s charms began to fade:
OK, so Thunderbird managed to delete a lot of my recent mail. Luckily, Mail.app had cached a copy of most of the messages. I’m also quite sick of Thunderbird’s frequent crashes, horrible search, flaky filters, and general instability. I’m switching back to Mail.app!
Sure, Thunderbird has all the bleeding edge bells and whistles, but none of the features work trouble-free, not even basic, core functionality. In the final analysis a mail program that works reliably at what it does is way more useful than one which has all the latest features, but nothing works.
Like the hare and the tortoise, Thunderbird streaks ahead in the comparison shootout at first, but slow and steady wins the race:
Tags: Apple Mail, Email in general, happy users, mail.app, pros and cons, thunderbird, unhappy usersIn the final analysis Apple’s Mail.app is still probably the most reliable, responsive, usable and full-featured email program available for OS X, or any platform for that matter.
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August 28th, 2006 at 10:09 pm
Well, don’t forget Entourage. I recently (sadly) switched from Mail.app to Entourage because I wanted an all-in solution with calendar to-dos and mail and, more than all, a project center where I could see all my project-related mails, to-dos, events, files etc. Unfortunately Apple is far away from proposing something similar in Leopard.
August 29th, 2006 at 12:28 am
(to Potaman)
Have a look at Daylite at http://www.marketcircle.com
I managed to stay with Mail and am hugely impressed with dayite (my business depends on it)
August 29th, 2006 at 3:10 am
The simple fact that he states that Mail.app is probably the best Mail application for any platform shows his stupidity. Sure, Thunderbird isn’t quite as good as mail in some areas, but as soon as it uses Apple’s Addressbook, I, along with a ton of people that I know will be switching. Mail.app simply cannot handle big IMAP boxes. Total hell.
Hell, Outlook on Windows is better than Mail.app.
August 29th, 2006 at 3:36 am
“Hell, Outlook on Windows is better than Mail.app.”
Ahahahaha, good one.
Mail.app does everything pretty much perfectly. I don’t know what you define as “big” IMAP mailboxes but my IMAP mailbox is over 500MB and Mail.app is handling it just fine.
Good spam filerting, good (and reliable) rule sets, inline attachments, built in Address Book support, built in iChat status, quick, lightweight, native UI (unlike Firefox/Thunderbird’s crappy XUL on OS X) AND the optionally download and highly recommended MailTags.
What more could anyone possibly want?
August 29th, 2006 at 4:29 am
I recently switched to Mail from Outlook on Windows after years and years of use (and multiple expensive upgrades), for several reasons. One was the unreliable filters Travis mentions. Outlook’s filters are unbelievably flakey, even if it wasn’t a business class application. Another biggie was the requisite antivirus software (even Microsoft’s own OneCare) that seemed like it was always busy preventing my use of the Internet while it downloaded updates, when all I wanted to do was make a quick check of my messages. (And don’t you just love how the software keeps nagging in one way or another to scan the hard drive?) A third reason was the Outlook calendar, which has such poor visual design that often-enough I accidentally scheduled appointments off by a day or in the AM instead of PM.
Anyway, I’m happily in Mail now, with a GB of mail in 30K+ messages and the program is performing just fine. I do miss the integrated aspect of Outlook, but I feel I’m much better off now. Will check out Daylite.
August 29th, 2006 at 5:14 am
I’ve been pretty satisfied with Mail, but the fact that Jobs made a big deal out of putting in a to-do list shows how neglected it has been.
August 29th, 2006 at 5:58 am
The IMAP problem in Mail.app depends on your mail server. Our university uses Novell’s Groupwise. The mail cache update is ridiculously slow. Can’t read messages until the data trickles in. Not a problem with other mail apps. So either Mail.app will somehow get fixed one day to speed up IMAP functions or we’ll switch to a server that plays better.
August 29th, 2006 at 6:29 am
why can’t the default attachmnet type BE PC COMPATIBLE. I get people all the time telling me they couldn’t view my JPG attachments because I didn’t click the stupid “send windows - friendly attachments” box. The one feature that makes you stare in disbelief.
August 29th, 2006 at 6:50 am
Jmross:
While I have certainly seen that checkbox I have never used it and have never had any issue with people not seeing my attachments properly.
I do understand your frustration with it though, if in fact it does actually do anything, why Apple wouldn’t make it DEFAULT Windows compatible…. well that just doesn’t make any sense.
August 29th, 2006 at 6:50 am
That Hashish guy must be a moron. I never lost any mails in Thunderbird. Apple’s Mail is a p.o.s.
August 29th, 2006 at 9:14 am
has anyone tried http://www.crm4mac.com
for a combo address book, cal and email which uses the apple dbs for each.
Just wondering?
palnudb
August 29th, 2006 at 9:19 am
Other Hawk Wings readers don’t much like it.
August 29th, 2006 at 11:46 am
[...] More [...]
August 29th, 2006 at 3:55 pm
Funny how different everyone’s experience or preference is. I don’t know about Firefox, but Entourage is problematic once you start collecting a large amount of mail (3-4 gigabytes), as it throws everything in one file that’s prone to corrupt and choke backups. Not to mention the smart mailboxes in mail are awesome, I couldn’t live without. But my boss likes Entourage, it’s certainly more MS friendly, better attachment & more rules options, which is important enough for him to provide me with hours of recovering damaged mail files regularly. No experience with imap, but Mail is certainly the best pop client (most reliable & powerful for large volume mail) I’ve ever seen.
August 29th, 2006 at 6:06 pm
“Why can’t the default attachmnet type BE PC COMPATIBLE.”
It can. With the mail browser window in front, choose Edit->Attachments->Always Send Windows-Friendly Attachments. A stupid place to put it, but at least it’s there.
To the person who asked why this was necessary: It all depends upon the receiving email client. Some handle AppleDouble/BinHex encoding better than others, and AOL seems especially retarded (surprise). In the Mac OS X age, there’s really no need to use AppleDouble/BinHex encoding because its only benefit is when you are sending files that have both resource and data forks to other Mac users, and these days very few files have resource forks.
I also had a client whose Exchange SMTP server was silently deleting any outgoing emails which had AppleDouble/BinHex attachments, so every copy of Entourage and Mail had to have the default attachment encoding changed. Fun!
August 29th, 2006 at 8:17 pm
Mail is OK. It is nothing to write home about. At least it has a native Cocoa GUI unlike Thunderbird, whose GUI is ugly and clumsy. Good grief, open addresses in Thunderbird and they pop up in a sidebar - how cockamamie is that in itself? - but in OS X the scroll bar for that is partially under the left-hand pane. (It’s OK on Linux and Windows, but the OS X GUI is screwed up.)
However, Mail is not a good IMAP client, and Thunderbird most definitely is. As well as Mail’s being very slow with IMAP, you cannot choose *which* folders to subscribe to. Giles Turnbull makes both points here:
http://www.oreillynet.com/mac/blog/2005/09/email_client_spleen_venting.html
… and adds some others, too. Many OS X users have written of being unable to connect to IMAP servers *at all* till switching from Mail to Thunderbird, although I think such reports are less frequent these days.
I guess Mail has improved with time. I can recall early iterations that would not send an attachment unless it was very small indeed - a problem I’ve never had with any version of Thunderbird.
It is also annoying that Mail does not understand sig-delimiters (hyphen-hyphen-space on a line of its own) and consequently cannot handle signature-stripping on replies. This is obviously a must for Usenet newsreaders where threads can be quite long and threading and attributions should be properly preserved, but standards-compliant email clients, like Thunderbird, Evolution, and Mulberry, follow the RFC recommendation here as well, even if MS (unsurprisingly) doesn’t.
On the mis-named “Windows-friendly attachments” see this article:
http://rixstep.com/1/20050509,00.shtml
As for to-dos and notes, for Pete’s sake, what’s up with that? What is the Leopard version of Mail supposed to be? An overweight mail client or an anorexic PIM client?
Overall, I don’t know about “close” even - and there’s certainly no “cigar” for Mail.
August 29th, 2006 at 10:49 pm
Hmmm…no mention of the version of TB that is being used–I’ve been using TB since b4 v1 and now use the v2beta and it’s rock solid on Mac (not on Windows). What did *the user* do to make it delete his mail? Filters work just as they are set up to. Yes, you can only search your online mail or your local mail, not both of them together (but you can search all subfolders in either of those locations at once). That seem fairly robust. When talking about comparison and analysis one should state how functions work on both apps and then describe shortcomings or advantages–where is such analysis? Did he really spend much time with the app? This can’t be called a good comparison or review.
August 30th, 2006 at 1:48 pm
I don’t know, I still like Eudora Light 5 better than any of these apps. Not as slick, but it’s always treated me well.
August 30th, 2006 at 2:43 pm
We use Apple Mail (have to - since we make DMI & Daylite) with huge IMAP mailboxes. I have well over 10GB of cached IMAP messages in my mail folder. The whole company runs on Apple Mail with a ton of shared IMAP folder and mailboxes (like over 50). We haven’t had a single problem with losing messages or anything like that.
We use Communigate Pro as our mail server. Maybe the problem is not with Apple Mail - maybe the problems are with the mail server?
August 31st, 2006 at 7:09 pm
Based on my experience with IMAP that’s certainly a possibility, yet easily overlooked in casual discussions like this one.
From a support perspective, I’d want to know which IMAP server software is being used since it can be helpful info when trying to isolate certain problems. And it’s in everyone’s best interest for IMAP client software developers to be aware of server-specific differences.
September 28th, 2006 at 7:18 am
I prefer T-Bird.
-Also, a friend of mine had Mail Absolutely Implode on his G5. Once his inbox reached 1GB+, Mail -Freaked- and took a week of raw gut agony between Apple Support, me, and his other techie friends before he was clear of it. -Yikes!
November 23rd, 2006 at 10:32 am
However much I have enjoyed using Mail.app over the past years, since osx 10.4.7 is is unusable. On my macbookpro it causes file corruption which knock out Mail.app completely. After a second event like this I’m forced to switch back to 10.4.6 to have a stable platform.
It’s been a very frustrating and expensive experience, and I recommend to anyone to stay clear from mail.app on any osx version after 10.4.6.
November 23rd, 2006 at 10:53 am
Elias, that sounds terrible. Sorry to hear your experience.
I have to say, though, that out of all the hundreds of Mail users that I have contact with, this is the first time that I have heard of something like this. Are you sure that it is Mail’s fault?
November 23rd, 2006 at 11:17 am
We haven’t heard of this kind of issue with Mail and 10.4.7 or 10.4.8. Considering we do DMI, I think we would have heard of a problem.
I suspect that something else is the cause.
February 1st, 2007 at 12:56 am
Thanks for your replies Hawk and AJ. As it turnes out my MacBookPro was the problem. it was one of the early series with the 7200 rpm harddisk and many of these computers have shown problems. After a long struggle and arguments with apple service they replaced the entire MacBookPro with a new one.
My problems had nothing to do with Mail.app! So your analysis of reliability stands.
March 22nd, 2007 at 10:44 pm
The one thing I liked about Entourage was that there was a little panel at the top to organise your attachments.
Unless I’m missing something, the way Mail.App deals with attachments is very flakey, they just get scattered about in the message field.
March 23rd, 2007 at 12:04 am
Mail does list the attachments in a message just under the other headers no matter where they are scattered through the message itself.
Is that not what you are looking for?
March 23rd, 2007 at 2:29 am
“Mail does list the attachments in a message just under the other headers no matter where they are scattered through the message itself.”
Thanks Tim. I know that. Entourage/Outlook has a separate box that you drag the attachments into. It lists them neatly, and you can easily select/reorder etc or see what they are. Much better.
With Mail, they scatter around and get in the way like jumbled graphics. Sometimes they open instead of staying as ikons, and get all jumbled up with the text. Very annoying.
March 23rd, 2007 at 8:16 am
Ah, I see. You can ge more control over the way Mail displays attachments with the Mail Attachments Iconizer plugin. That might help.
June 28th, 2008 at 4:45 pm
I just got handed an iBook G4 and will be using Mail. Is there a way to update Mail.app by downloading later versions?? Or am I stuck with what’s installed on this Mac? I come from a (gasp!) Windows background. :-)
0 Max (aka MaxTheITpro)