Leander Kahney is the managing editor of Wired News . He writes the Cult of Mac blog , and is author of two books about Mac and iPod culture: Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod .

HW: What kind of Mac do you use?

LK: At work I use a dual-processor Power Mac G5 (2Ghz, I think) with a couple of old CRT monitors. It’s got 2Gbytes of RAM and is nice and fast. At home, I have an original 1.6 Ghz Power Mac G5. I thought it was fast — three years ago.

I also have a G4 PowerBook (aluminum 1.25GHz) and a G4 iBook, which my wife and kids use. (There’s also several stashed away we no longer use — a G3 PowerBook, an eMac, a couple of bondi-blue iMacs, two classic compact Macs, etc). At home I’m glued to the PowerBook. I can no longer watch TV without also surfing the Web or doing email; and almost all my reading these days is electronic.

HW: How long have you been using Mail.app? What other clients have you used (and why did you stop)?

LK: I use Mail.app at home and have done since it was released. I was also a devoted user of Mail.app at work, until about six months ago when I returned from a week-long break and had about 35,000 email messages waiting for me, most of it spam. Mail.app choked on the load, and so did MS Entourage, Mailsmith and others I tried. Only Mozilla’s Thunderbird could cope, so I switched.

I haven’t been really happy with it though until I discovered a Mail.app theme called Crossover . Now it’s just like using Mail.app, except there’s no built-in spell checker or .Mac syncing.

HW: What plugins and extensions do you use to make your email experience better?

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CrossOver, the Apple Mail theme for Thunderbird, has been updated to work with newer releases.

It now works with all versions of Thunderbird (0.7 – 1.6a1).

You can see a screenshot of the theme in a previous Hawk Wings post and also read there about how it does and doesn’t match Mail.app.

You can get the updated theme (or just look at it some more) on the Mozilla Update web site.

While you are there, check out the users’ comments for some bugs in the new release of CrossOver, including disabled radio buttons and bad colour matching.

Rizvan has developed a theme called Crossover for the Mozilla email client, Thunderbird, which gives it the look of Apple Mail.

The theme features Apple Mail’s Panther icons (although with different icons for the Sent and Drafts folders), fonts and a Mail-like layout. But it’s not quite the Real Thing as you can see from the screenshot below:

thunderbird, mail.app, apple mail, theme, crossover, panther mail