Kim Cavanaugh and Fraser Speirs are both feeling strangely unsettled and unhappy with Mail.app. Somehow the love is fading.

Kim finds that Mail treats their relationship with less respect than it once did. Now it lets all sorts of spam into his Inbox.

Now back in the day, those would have gone directly into the Junk folder. But not now. Something has changed. Somehow you just don’t seem to care anymore.

Fraser can’t put a finger on his dis-ease. Mail.app, he says, has simply been “behaving atrociously for me over the past couple of days”.

And he is not confident that a better email client will ever emerge:

This is one area where Apple’s involvement has not benefited consumers because Apple’s offering is uncharacteristically poor. There is some demand for such a product and I’m sure there are developers able to build a good mail client. Unfortunately, Apple’s presence in the market with an almost-good-enough free product makes it an exceptionally risky investment for any company.

Of course one never knows what’s just around the corner. It’s possible that Leopard will fix all Mail’s ills and give it a fresh injection of life. Who knows. Communication with the user community is not a strong point with the Mail Development Team.

As far as I know there are only two other hopes on the horizon. Allan Odgaard of TextMate fame has hinted that a friend of his is working on a new email client. If Allan is involved, I’d have high hopes for the finished product.

Matt Ronge is also working on a new IMAP-focussed mail client, Kiwi.

As a hard-core email client monogamist, I’m never tempted to stray. Even in deepest Mail.app IMAP hell, I know the relationship is making me a better person. As the good book says,

suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.

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Ever wondered about the breakdown of email clients among Mac users or which clients are gaining and losing ground?

I have. And now we know. At least, we know what email clients are preferred by 7,750 macOSXHints users.

In May 2004, macOSXHints held a poll asking readers about their favourite email client. 4,251 readers voted and the results looked like this:

Last week, macOSXHints asked the same question and this time 7,750 people voted:

A number of clients, for example Mailsmith and PowerMail, hardly moved at all.

Mail.app and Entourage are the biggest losers. Even if you take the view that Entourage users are under-represented on macOSXHints, the decline is surprising. Mail.app dropped a raw 7%, almost 10% of its 2004 user base.

Gmail and Thunderbird are the winners. There is enough anecdotal evidence on Hawk Wings alone to make Gmail’s rise expected, but I was a little taken aback by the rise and rise of Thunderbird.

Looking at these results, what surprises you?

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Matt Ronge is working a new open source IMAP email client for OS X.

Called Kiwi, the client is a Cocoa app, built with MailCore , a Cocoa email framework, and LibEtPan , a C-based library for working with email protocols.

In an email, Matt explained to me how it will beat the pants off existing email clients that support IMAP:

Kiwi is a new e-mail application built from the ground up to support IMAP and the latest Mac OS X features. It features a native, Cocoa-based interface, and an engine designed for high performance (Kiwi is currently able to handle folders containing up to 60,000 messages).

Most other clients were designed for POP3 with IMAP support as a later patch, but IMAP is a totally different paradigm. So to truly take advantage of it, an application needs to be written around it and Kiwi is being written specifically for Kiwi. Kiwi’s goal is to provide the best IMAP experience on the Mac OS X platform, and best of all it’s going to be open source so everyone can contribute their great ideas.

Kiwi has a web site , where you can read more about it and will be able to download the beta when it is released. He says that the beta is still “some months away”.

Matt has also written a post on his site, setting out what’s wrong with IMAP support in existing clients (Mail.app is “slowly getting better”, he says) and suggesting some other ways in which it could be done.

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Gmail’s feature-rich web interface and the Web 2.0 hype are prompting more and more people to abandon desktop email clients.

Stowe Boyd at Corante dropped Mail.app for Gmail’s web-based interface and was glad to leave the “big fat app” behind in favour of Gmail’s leanness.

Jeremy Zawodny is using web-based email exclusively now. Despite some frustrations, he is “reasonable happy with Gmail”.

Jim at Jounreyman James found that leaving Apple Mail for Gmail simplified his life.

(UPDATE: You can add Cheesetoe to the list. And C.K. Sample III.)

Against this background, Jean-Francois Arseneault’s post about canning his Gmail account stood out. He is very happy about a return to Thunderbird, which he in turn says has simplified his email life.

Google has gone off the boil for him. His concerns, which he lists in his blog entry, are part technical and part privacy-related. “Knowing Google can see my communications is down right freaky”, Jean-Francois says.

Concerns about Gmail and privacy are nothing new. Gmail’s policy of never deleting anything raises interesting questions about privacy and data-ownership. Its revised privacy policy, released in October last year, was not reassuring.

Mike Bell recently posted his concerns about Google Analytics in the Mint Support Forum. He’s dropped the Google service as he believes that it violates his site’s privacy policy. “I’m not impressed, however, with the fact that Google has access to all of my user stats and they can cross reference those and correlate them and then target my users,” he writes.

Another new Gmail feature also raises privacy concerns. Suyog is worried about Gmail’s new “map feature”, which offers to map any address found in one of your emails. “For God’s sake”, he says, “I hope Google stops any more feature creeps like these!”

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