Brady J Frey is the founder and creative director of Dotfive and has a decade of print and web design experience. He is a well published writer of both fiction and journalism who is currently managing his company’s IT until he falls out of love with it.

It interests me especially that he uses Mail.app in an enterprise environment where other email clients are often preferred.

He uses a Dual 2 GHz PowerPC G5 with 4GB RAM running 10.4.4 on 250gb + 500gb internal harddive, backing up to a Lacie 500gb as needed; with *cough* 3rd Party Flat Panel displays.

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

BF: I was originally turned onto mail.app when I upgraded to Panther (very shortly after it was released). At the time I had been using a very buggy Entourage, and was looking for a robust alternative. Panther’s mail.app was very appealing from the get go — the clean icons (similar to Thunderbird), and most importantly the drawer that that would spawn a million alternative drawer[ed] applications. I had used Thunderbird, and while it had it’s pluses, namely stable interaction with Linux servers and extendability — it never has felt like a macintosh application should feel (nor does it play will with other macintosh applications).

For a short while I migrated to MailSmith from Bare Bones as well — but this application is more appealing to the developer in me, not the designer (as it is a text only mail application), and suffers from only POP support — once I embraced IMAP, I’ve never wanted to go back.

Entourage is another story in its own right — and I can thank its demise on my computer as a way of taking back my love for this OS. Its strong collaboration tools always seem to drag me back into at least attempting to make good use of its power… but it’s a flaky application on the IMAP front, its support for vCard standards is not full (though neither can Apple’s address book take that crown), it’s a completely unattractive and counter intuitive UI, weighed down by what seems to be lots of features, but no unified image. Every time I take two steps forward into resurrecting it, I always go five steps back.

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

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Andrew Escobar is an undergraduate student studying Finance and the developer of Mail Stamps (a utility that removes the bizarre lozenge-shaped buttons in Tiger Mail) and Front Row Enabler .

His first Mac was a Macintosh Classic, but he was primarily raised on a PC.

He switched to the Mac in 2001, using a trusty 700Mhz Power Mac Quicksilver. He now uses a 1.25Ghz PowerBook, which is to be replaced by a MacBook Pro in September.

HW: How long have you been using Mail.app?

AE: I began to use Mail when I switched to the Mac platform, after falling in love with the PowerBook G4 and Mac OS X.

I used Mail in conjunction with the web-based Yahoo Mail until my account began being inundated with spam. I’ve been using Mail exclusively since I purchased my PowerBook in September 2003. I’ve been very happy with Mail since, and it’s yet to really give me a reason to look elsewhere for another email client.

In my PC years I put up with Outlook and Outlook Express out of pure ignorance.

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

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Peter Maurer is a medical student who likes creating software for the mac in his spare time.

Peter’s spare time has yielded gems like Witch , Butler , Textpander, , Service Scrubber and more.

He uses a iMac G5 B (17 inches, 1.8 GHz, 1 GB RAM) which he says is, believe it or not, completely sufficient for programming.

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

PM: Ever since I’ve switched from OS 9 (was using Eudora back then) to OS X. I don’t quite remember exactly when I switched to OS X, but it was during the 10.0 era, so we’re probably talking about more or less five years here.

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

PM: None. I had installed some plug-ins (GPGMail for instance) in the past, but I’ve grown tired of tracking updates in order to keep those working.

HW: What’s your favourite thing about Mail.app?

PM: Actually, there are a few:

1. Never had to look at the manual — it’s that intuitive.

2. I like being able to choose colors for different kinds of mails — e.g., donations are green ;-)

3. Mail.app is free.

HW: What’s your pet hate about Mail.app?

PM: I’d like to have one trash for all my different e-mail accounts. Who needs a “Trash” folder with three trash cans inside?

HW: If you could tell the Apple Mail development team one thing, what would it be?

PM: Hire me ;-)

But seriously: I’d probably say “Good Work!”.

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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.talking mail.app, likes, dislikes, apple mail, mail.app, Peter Maurer

Rui Carmo is a project manager at a major European mobile operator who has decided to use Macs as his primary home platform.

He currently has an aging (but feisty) 800MHz G3 iBook, an original 20″ iMac G5 and a Mac mini, as well as a Linux IMAP server where he aggregates all his e-mail using arcane incantations of fetchmail and procmail.

His Tao of Mac blog is justly famous.

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

RC: Hmm. That’s a tricky one. I used to work off a NeXTCube, so I could say I’ve been using Mail.app for more than a decade – but it wasn’t my main mail account (and, more to the point, it isn’t the same application anymore), so I’ll focus on when I got back to using Macs – roughly four years ago.

As to what other clients I’ve used (on the Mac), well… Despite the odd invocation of mutt to rifle through mbox files or test something, I’ve never felt any interest in using anything else except Thunderbird. You see I still spend my time jumping between Mac, Windows and Linux, so it’s the only thing that has the potential to let me standardize on a simple, unified UI (with minor variations) across platforms.

Actually, I find myself using Thunderbird on a Mac quite regularly, since Mail.app doesn’t honor the SOCKS proxy settings in the Network Preferences pane.

Since I spend most of my time hooked up via SSH tunnels to someplace (so much so that I modded SSHKeyChain to add a “-D 1080″ to its SSH invocations), I need at least one graphical MUA that can do IMAP over SOCKS properly…

Besides that, the three things that prevent me from switching to Thunderbird permanently are lack of Address Book integration, lack of AppleScript support and Spotlight not playing well with it – some of which I expect to be fixed eventually.

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

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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.talking mail.app, likes, dislikes, apple mail, mail.app, Giles Turnbull

Andreas has a Ph.D. in physics and works for a small company in San Diego, CA which develops measurement instrumentation mostly for research.

Despite having no formal programming training he keeps his few skills up to date by writing some software on the side, like the very excellent Mail Scripts and Eudora Mailbox Cleaner

HW: What kind of Mac do you use?

AA: My personal Macs have always been portable (5300c 100MHz, 3400c 200MHz, G3 “Lombard” 333MHz – all of which don’t exist any longer, TiBook 550MHz – fulfilling its duties as my personal server despite it broken screen hinge – and currently an AlBook 1.5GHz). My first encounter with a Mac was a Mac 128k I had to write a program for during my university days.

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

AA: I switched to Mail.app in January 2002 (I guess that would have been OS X 10.1). Before that I used Eudora (starting with some version 1.x or 2.x back in about 1992). After Eudora more than once mangled mailboxes beyond repair I decided to ditch it.

Apart from that I am using Thunderbird on my PC at work (after ditching Outlook once I realized how bad it did with IMAP accounts).

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

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John Gruber is the author of Daring Fireball. His primary computer is a 15-inch PowerBook G4 named Joker.

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

JG: I’ve only been using Mail regularly since early September 2005, when we began eating our own dog food and switched our mail server at Joyent (the company I work for) to our own product, which supports IMAP but not POP.

I use Mail only to access my Joyent email account. I use Mailsmith to access all my other email, and have used it since version 1.0 in 1998. I’d still be using Mailsmith for my Joyent email if it weren’t for the fact that Mailsmith only supports POP.

(To be clear: I wholeheartedly endorse our decision at Joyent to only support IMAP clients.)

Also, you don’t want to get me started on calling Apple Mail “Mail.app”.

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

JG: None.

HW: What’s your favourite thing about Apple Mail?

JG: The way it allows you to paste images inline within plain text messages.

HW: What’s your pet hate about Apple Mail?

JG: When it comes to writing, its mail composition environment is clumsy and primitive.

HW: If you could tell the Apple Mail development team one thing, what would it be?

JG: That the way Mail attempts to handle quoted passages in replies (in plain text messages) is cute if you want to be a top-poster who quotes the entire message you’re replying to, but frustrating and annoying if you want to do the right thing.

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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.Talking Mail.app, likes, dislikes, mail.app, apple mail, John Gruber, Mailsmith