Brady J Frey is the founder and creative director of Dotfive 
and has a decade of print and web design experience. He is a well published writer of both fiction and journalism who is currently managing his company’s IT until he falls out of love with it.
It interests me especially that he uses Mail.app in an enterprise environment where other email clients are often preferred.
He uses a Dual 2 GHz PowerPC G5 with 4GB RAM running 10.4.4 on 250gb + 500gb internal harddive, backing up to a Lacie 500gb as needed; with *cough* 3rd Party Flat Panel displays.
HW: How long have you been using Mail.app? What other clients have you used (and why did you stop)?
BF: I was originally turned onto mail.app when I upgraded to Panther (very shortly after it was released). At the time I had been using a very buggy Entourage, and was looking for a robust alternative. Panther’s mail.app was very appealing from the get go — the clean icons (similar to Thunderbird), and most importantly the drawer that that would spawn a million alternative drawer[ed] applications. I had used Thunderbird, and while it had it’s pluses, namely stable interaction with Linux servers and extendability — it never has felt like a macintosh application should feel (nor does it play will with other macintosh applications).
For a short while I migrated to MailSmith from Bare Bones as well — but this application is more appealing to the developer in me, not the designer (as it is a text only mail application), and suffers from only POP support — once I embraced IMAP, I’ve never wanted to go back.
Entourage is another story in its own right — and I can thank its demise on my computer as a way of taking back my love for this OS. Its strong collaboration tools always seem to drag me back into at least attempting to make good use of its power… but it’s a flaky application on the IMAP front, its support for vCard standards is not full (though neither can Apple’s address book take that crown), it’s a completely unattractive and counter intuitive UI, weighed down by what seems to be lots of features, but no unified image. Every time I take two steps forward into resurrecting it, I always go five steps back.
HW: What plugins and extensions do you use to make your email experience better?
