In a comment on another Hawk Wings post, Dave asks how to switch his email over from Eudora for Windows to Mail.app.

The answer is easy (especially as Andreas Amann, the developer of Eudora Mailbox Cleaner has already written out the answer):

1. Copy your Windows Eudora data folder onto a USB stick or something similar so that you can move it to your Mac.
2. [UPDATE: It emerges that there is an imtermediate step in here, too complicated to make into a bullet point but not complicated enough to make the process difficult. Details in EMC's readme file - Thanks, Dave].
3. Drop the complete Eudora data folder onto Eudora Mailbox Cleaner and wait for the conversion to finish.

Eudora Mailbox Cleaner also offers easy transitions from Thunderbird (Mac, Windows or Linux):

It’s freeware (donations from grateful users not turned away) and available from Andreas’ web site .

[Thanks, Andreas :)]

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Khoi Vinh has had enough . Although he is a long-time Entourage user and finds that the app is “a class act” that “frequently showcased the very best of what Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit had to offer”, he’s dumped it. It was just too slow and the new Intel Mac version too far away.

He’s liking his new email client, Mail.app, a lot:

There may be a fantastic new iteration of Entourage in the works, but I need a fast, nimble and Intel-friendly email client today. So I’ve switched over entirely to Apple’s Mail; there’s just no arguing with its lightning fast search performance, its Mac OS X native fit and finish, and the fact that it’s available right now.

Of course, there are some things that he doesn’t like. The perfect email client is yet to appear. In particular Mail’s Smart Mailboxes don’t seem so smart to him.

But it has proved the right move. Most of all, he’s loving the improvement with IMAP accounts:

Mail is very responsive with IMAP, to the point where it’s a nearly seamless experience, more or less exactly how IMAP was intended to work. This allows me to move easily between work and home computers while keeping my mail database in sync, and without effort. Brilliant.

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I was surprised to discover an email that I received a few days ago was written in Mailsmith, so someone is still using it. (In fact, he is a member of the Mac blogging nobility, where Mailsmith retains strong appeal, so I shouldn’t have been so surprised).

If you are using Mailsmith and thinking about a move to Mail.app (or anywhere else), David Hamilton has written a script that exports emails in a smarter way than the default that comes with Mailsmith itself.

He has tweaked it so that it will preserve your folder hierarchy in Mailsmith which the default script flattens.

Of course, “no guarantees, representations, or warrantees by the author or anyone else”.

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Dave Hamilton from the Mac Observer is thinking about switching to Mail.app.

He has had a gutful of his old mail client:

Mailsmith, by most rights, has stagnated. It pains me to write this, because as I said, I’m a really big fan of BareBones, and enjoy a great working relationship with their head-honcho, Rich Siegel. But it’s true… Mailsmith hasn’t had a public release/update since March of 2005. Now some folks may argue that it doesn’t need an update, and for those folks, I’m sure that’s correct. My big problem is that I manage a LOT of e-mail… I have almost 1400 mailboxes within which are nearly 200,000 e-mail messages. I pretty much save everything, and it’s saved my ass in HUGE ways over the years, so I ain’t gonna stop.

So, he wonders, does Mail.app have what it takes to manage a large number of mailboxes and bucketloads of email? Or is he better off archiving off a large slab of the emails and staying with Mailsmith?

My advice is not much good. I only have about 35,000 emails spread over four IMAP accounts and about ten mailboxes (see further, “How the delete key is your best friend”). That’s chicken feed by Dave’s standards.

Justin Blanton once ran a challenge to find the largest Mail mailbox, putting up his own inbox of 22,000 as a candidate.

What’s your experience? What’s your biggest mailbox? How many mailboxes does your Mail.app handle without working up a sweat?

Can Mail.app take the load? Does size matter?

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François Joseph de Kermadec, who posts on the O’Reilly MacDevCenter site, got quite a fright from Mail.app today:

Today, Mail went postal (hmm, do I chalk up that one as a bad pun or coincidental wording?) on me. Deleting a message would make it reappear. Moving anything would duplicate it. Corruption crept everywhere, in subtle ways. Nothing was really reproducible but nothing was totally random either. In other words, hell.

As a result, he is giving up on Mail with a mixture of anxiety and hope.

The rest of his post is an interesting tour through the innards of Mail.app’s Mail folder, weighing the good and bad things about its organisation and arguing that the app’s development has brought about too much complexity:

To me, Mail’s facade is the best of all Mac OS X applications out there. The way it thinks about mails, the way organizes them. But looking into its Mail folder just shows how it has evolved and, more importantly, how dramatically it did, with no signs of slowing down. Too much in too little time, really. For example, should a crucial application like an email client rely on the first version of system-wide frameworks (I’m thinking Spotlight here)? Should an application take it upon itself to create an SSL-capable account automatically upon first startup without turning SSL on and without giving the user a chance to stop sending the password in the clear (.Mac indeed)?

He’s not sure what client to switch to. And there’s the rub. For all its quirks, it’s hard to beat Mail.app as the most satisfying email client out there. Not least, the control it gives to users through an abundance of plugins is unparalleled.

He’ll be back.

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Nick Gerakines has had a gutful of Mail.app.

“I’ve become sick and tired of Mail.app crashing and failing”, he writes.

So he is returning to an old favourite and he is liking what he sees after a few years away with other email clients:

I’ve used everything from Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Mail.app, Evolution, Thunderbird, Entourage and even Squirrelmail. None of them, however, compare to the simplicity and security that I have with mutt.

He outlines how he has set up mutt to run on his Mac, and how it co-operates with fetchmail, procmail and postfix to deliver just the email experience that he likes.

He promises to post more detailed howtos soon.

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