Talking Mail.app: Daniel Jalkut
Saturday, February 11th, 2006
Daniel Jalkut started work at Apple in 1995 as a contractor. He initially worked on Carbon, but moved to the OS X group in 1999, where he was part of the CoreServices Group for Mac OS X.
These days he is an independent software consultant specializing in Macintosh development. In his spare time he writes about technology and the Mac on Red Sweater Blog 
(recently anointed by John Gruber who says that it is “turning into one of my very favorite Mac weblogs”).
His main Mac is a Dual 2.0Ghz PowerMac G5, anxiously awaiting replacement by a MacBook Pro.
HW: How long have you been using Mail.app? What other clients have you used (and why did you stop)?
DJ: I have been using Mail.app since switching to Mac OS X as my primary work platform. This switch occurred when I moved to the Mac OS X group at Apple in time to work on the “Developer Preview” releases. I guess that would make it 1999.
I think Mail.app was still called MailViewer at that time. Mail was “OK” but using it was mostly out of necessity - I wanted to handle everything on my main computer, and I wanted to “eat my dogfood” and work on Mac OS X as much as possible.
A brief history of email clients I used previous to that:
Eudora (OS 9) - After getting too frustrated with Claris Emailer’s sorting capabilities.
Claris Emailer (OS 9) - Apple’s previous “in-house” client. It had a lot of nice features but ultimately stopped being updated to match the real world use of email.
eWorld and/or PowerTalk (OS 9) - For some period of time while Apple was really confused about everything, they tried to convince us to use these in-house proprietary solutions. That was bad.
QuickMail (OS 9) - For a hideous period of time between when I joined Apple and when they “woke up to real email,” we all used QuickMail from CE Software. This was a proprietary client *and* a proprietary delivery system. It could do some cool things like “Unsend” mail when you realized you goofed and the recipient hadn’t read it, yet. Other than that, it was a big nuisance to me, coming from a standard “Unix-based” mail environment.
Unix Mail (various platforms) - I got started with email using shared personal UNIX systems run by hobbyists. Sort of a natural outgrowth of BBS culture, but all based on a dialup UNIX platform. I ended up sticking with the basic command-line based mail client all through my teen years and through college. I even wrote a “naive user’s manual for mail” as a Technical Writing class project.
HW: What plugins and extensions do you use to make your email experience better?
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