Hawk Wings » happy users

Thunderbird vs. Mail.app shootout

Tim Gaden — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 11:03:09 +0000

Ashish Gulhati, CEO of email service provider Neomailbox , decided to dump Mail and give Thunderbird another try.

At first glance, he was impressed with the improvements since he last used it twelve months ago.

He even got inspired enough to list Thunderbird’s pros and cons. In short, he concluded, the Mozilla client “sure seemed to surpass Mail.app in terms of bleeding edge features.”

Then the rot set in and Thunderbird’s charms began to fade:

OK, so Thunderbird managed to delete a lot of my recent mail. Luckily, Mail.app had cached a copy of most of the messages. I’m also quite sick of Thunderbird’s frequent crashes, horrible search, flaky filters, and general instability. I’m switching back to Mail.app!

Sure, Thunderbird has all the bleeding edge bells and whistles, but none of the features work trouble-free, not even basic, core functionality. In the final analysis a mail program that works reliably at what it does is way more useful than one which has all the latest features, but nothing works.

Like the hare and the tortoise, Thunderbird streaks ahead in the comparison shootout at first, but slow and steady wins the race:

In the final analysis Apple’s Mail.app is still probably the most reliable, responsive, usable and full-featured email program available for OS X, or any platform for that matter.

mail.app, apple mail, thunderbird, email in general, pros and cons, happy users, unhappy usersSimilar Posts:

Why Apple Mail makes Leander smile

Tim Gaden — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 13:28:40 +0000

Leander Kahney loves the way that Apple Mail reformats the date of an email on the fly as you resize the Date column in the List Viewer.

Other clients display an ellipsis or just chop the date off, but Mail is in a class of its own:

…only Apple’s Mail actually changes the format. When I first discovered this, I sat there delighted, making the column wide and then narrow, beaming as the date format switched smoothly and seamlessly between numbers and text to perfectly fit the space allocated.

Part of the magic of this discovery was the serendipity. If it had been a “feature” — a behavior purposely brought to my attention by Apple — I would have shrugged and said, “so what?” But because I discovered it by accident, it struck me as artisan touch; a craftsman’s attention to detail.

For him it is a reminder of the repeated way in which “Apple delights with its focus on the user experience”.

Surely it is just coincidence, but it is nice to read Leander’s epiphany after a month in which Mail.app gave Mark Pilgrim an excuse to switch away from OS X altogether.mail.app, apple mail, user interface, usability, happy users, apple, mac osx Similar Posts:

Switchers drop Lotus Notes, Thunderbird for Mail

Tim Gaden — Sun, 30 Apr 2006 12:39:58 +0000

Over at orangehat, the poster is dumping Thunderbird for Mail.app. He is throwing off his loyalty to Mozilla, and looking forward to the greater integration Mail offers. Thunderbird he says is “just slightly clunkersville”.

Mike Radomski is surprised to discover that “Mail.app rocks”.

A long-time Lotus Notes user, he recently switched to Mail.app. He was able to connect to his office’s Domino system easily and he is liking what he sees after the switch:

I was delightfully astonished on how more usable my e-mail client became. I can read, sort and search my mail faster and more accurately. I can also switch between accounts with ease.

Mail Act-on and MailTags are supercharging his pleasure.switching, lotus notes, thunderbird, mail.app, apple mail, happy users Similar Posts: