Talking Mail.app: Giles Turnbull
Friday, February 17th, 2006
Giles Turnbull is a writer based in the UK. His work has been published in MacUser, Macworld, The Guardian and on BBC Online.
He uses a 1.67GHz 15″ PowerBook G4, with a 1.42GHz Mac mini as a testing/standby machine. Giles no longer uses Mail, having switched to Thunderbird. But he has his regrets….
HW: How long have you been using Mail.app? What other clients have you used (and why did you stop)?
GT: I probably used it for just over a year, starting from the moment I switched from using a POP account to an IMAP account. Prior to that I’d been a happy Eudora user for many years.
HW: What plugins and extensions do you use to make your email experience better?
GT: Mail Act-On.
HW: What’s your favourite thing about Mail.app?
GT: Mail Act-On. Oh, and the way it does threading. I miss that now.
HW: What’s your pet hate about Mail.app?
GT: Everything taking so long over IMAP. The constant mysterious activity in the activity window. The activity window itself. The way that when you hit Reply, the message you’re replying to disappears (and yes, I know there’s a simple keyboard trick to prevent this, but I didn’t learn about it for a long time…).
HW: If you could tell the Apple Mail development team one thing, what would it be?
GT: Please, please, please make it faster using IMAP. And please integrate an activity indicator into the main window, rather than having that extra one.
I switched from Mail to Thunderbird, which is at least faster. But it still has glitches and problems. Only yesterday I wasted 40 minutes or so investigating, then solving by means of a complete un-and-re-install, some weird profile snafu in Thunderbird.
There have been several occasions when I’ve been *this close* to switching to Gmail, which appears to be one of the best mail clients I’ve used for ages. I love all the features. But ultimately I cannot bring myself to trust Google enough to leave all my email with them. It’s fine now, sure, but who knows when Google might change its advertising policies and start using graphical ads? Who knows when Sergey and Larry might quit for an easy life on the beach, and let the company fall into the hands of people whose motto is: “Well, A Little Bit Of Evil Is OK”?
UPDATE: (17 February 2006) Giles emails to say, “Guess what? I just ditched Thunderbird and went back to Eudora…”
Giles also blogs at MacDevCenter 
, where he writes with an elegance and verve that I much admire. Read some of his good stuff:
Tweaking Tiger Mail
Launchers for Mac OS X
Mac users and the Macs they use
17 Things you might not know you can do with iWork
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You can read other interviews with developers and Mac identities talking about their Mail.app experiences by following this tag cloud link.
Tags: Apple Mail, dislikes, Giles Turnbull, likes, mail.app, talking mail.app