Pierre Igot is a professional translator, writer, and Mac technical support person living in southwest Nova Scotia, Canada. He maintains his own web site of literature, music, and visuals at http://www.latext.com and his own blog at http://www.betalogue.com.

His primary home office machine is a Power Macintosh G5 Quad with 4.5 GB of RAM and two 500 MB Seagate hard drives, used with a dual-monitor setup consisting of an Apple Cinema HD 30″ display and an older Apple Cinema HD 23″ display. He uses all kinds of software in his daily computing activities, including Mac OS X 10.4, Mail, Safari, NetNewsWire, iTunes, iPhoto, GarageBand, Pages, Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite 2, BBEdit, FileMaker Pro, etc.

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

PI: I switched from Eudora to Mail via Mailsmith in August 2002. I even wrote an article about the adventure at the time.

Basically, I was a long-time Eudora user, but had become disappointed with the lack of progress of the Mac OS X version. The program was in endless beta mode, there were lots of glitches, many core Mac OS X features were not supported, etc. Since I was also a long-time user and fan of Bare Bones Software’s BBEdit (mostly for web site authoring), I figured I would give Mailsmith , their e-mail client, a try.

I was thoroughly disappointed by Mailsmith. There was no integration with Mac OS X’s Address Book (at the time), and its own address book was really poor. (It didn’t even distinguish between first name and last name, forcing you type the names in reverse order to make sure they would be properly alphabetized!) But it had rather impressive filtering capabilities. I was willing to live with the flaws, but the deal breaker was the program’s performance, which was simply unacceptable.

I was also very wary of using a program where my entire e-mail archive was stored in a single (huge) database file. That was one of the primary reasons why I never even considered switching to Microsoft’s Entourage, even though I owned a copy of it as part of Microsoft Office. (As a long-time Microsoft Word user, I am also all too aware of the poor quality of Microsoft’s software for the Mac in general. I know that Entourage is supposed to be better, but on the handful of occasions where I actually tried using the program, I wasn’t particularly impressed. Things haven’t changed significantly since 2002 as far as I can tell.)

When I decided to switch to Mail, I was fully aware of its limitations. But there were too many benefits that outweighed the limitations: full Mac OS X integration with Address Book support, support for core Mac OS X features such as Quartz text smoothing, use of the “.mbox” file format for storing e-mail mailboxes, etc. And the price was nice too, of course.

I have been using Mail for nearly four years now, and, in spite of all the trials and tribulations, I haven’t regretted my choice. One thing I should emphasize for prospective switchers, however: If you want to switch from Eudora, make sure to use Eudora Mailbox Cleaner. I wasn’t aware of this application at the time, and ended up using the built-in import features in Mailsmith and then Mail to import my extensive archive of old e-mail. I am still living with the consequences of this process (badly encoded accented characters, HTML rendered as plain text, etc.) in some of my old e-mail.

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

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drunkenbatman is “some guy with a website ” and uses a 667 MHz Powerbook nicknamed “hairdryer.”

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

db: I’ve never been able to use Mail.app full-time, or at least I’ve never been able to let myself use it full time. In terms of CLI clients, I’ve used Pine, Mutt, etc. On the Mac, I’ve played with everything but primarily used Emailer, Eudora, Entourage and Gyazmail. On Linux it’s primarily been KMail and Evolution, and on Windows it’s primarily been Outlook, Eudora and Batmail, although now I think it’s called The Bat.

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

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Leander Kahney is the managing editor of Wired News . He writes the Cult of Mac blog , and is author of two books about Mac and iPod culture: Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod .

HW: What kind of Mac do you use?

LK: At work I use a dual-processor Power Mac G5 (2Ghz, I think) with a couple of old CRT monitors. It’s got 2Gbytes of RAM and is nice and fast. At home, I have an original 1.6 Ghz Power Mac G5. I thought it was fast — three years ago.

I also have a G4 PowerBook (aluminum 1.25GHz) and a G4 iBook, which my wife and kids use. (There’s also several stashed away we no longer use — a G3 PowerBook, an eMac, a couple of bondi-blue iMacs, two classic compact Macs, etc). At home I’m glued to the PowerBook. I can no longer watch TV without also surfing the Web or doing email; and almost all my reading these days is electronic.

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

LK: I use Mail.app at home and have done since it was released. I was also a devoted user of Mail.app at work, until about six months ago when I returned from a week-long break and had about 35,000 email messages waiting for me, most of it spam. Mail.app choked on the load, and so did MS Entourage, Mailsmith and others I tried. Only Mozilla’s Thunderbird could cope, so I switched.

I haven’t been really happy with it though until I discovered a Mail.app theme called Crossover . Now it’s just like using Mail.app, except there’s no built-in spell checker or .Mac syncing.

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

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Fraser Speirs runs Connected Flow , the developer of FlickrExport and Xjournal . He’s based in Greenock, Scotland and when not writing software to deal with digital pictures, is usually out taking them.

His first Mac was a Mac Plus in high school, eventually graduating to a Performa 450, a Performa 6400, a G3/266, a dual-500MHz G4, a Quicksilver 800MHz G4 and, today, a 1GHz PowerBook G4. He impatiently awaits the arrival of his Macbook Pro.

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

FS: I’ve been using Mail since Mac OS X 10.0 shipped. In the past, I’ve used Claris Em@iler – which I still consider to be the application that took usability to a whole new level on Mac OS – Outlook Express and Bare Bones’ Mailsmith.

I forget exactly why I stopped using Em@iler – I think it had problems on later OSes or something.

I used Mailsmith since it was 1.0, and I still think it has the best implementation of a UI for setting filter criteria that any developer has implemented, anywhere.

The main reason I stopped using Mailsmith was that I discovered IMAP and couldn’t live without it. Mailsmith doesn’t support IMAP and I’m not sure it ever will. I still toy with switching back to Mailsmith, but it’s easy to switch between clients that support IMAP – not so easy to commit to a POP-only client.

After I became an IMAP junkie, I used Outlook Express for a while. On the whole, it wasn’t a bad client.

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

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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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Joe Kissell is a frequent contributor to Macworld magazine and the author of numerous books and ebooks about Mac OS X software, including Take Control of Apple Mail in Tiger and Take Control of Spam with Apple Mail.

His primary Mac at the moment is a 2 GHz, 20″ iMac G5 with 2 GB of RAM, a 400 GB hard drive, and a second 20″ widescreen display.

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

JK: I’ve been using Mail.app as my main client since a few months after the final version of Mac OS X 10.0 was released. I’ll admit that I was not terribly excited by the first couple of versions, and bounced back to other clients now and then when Mail wouldn’t do something I needed. But I still thought it would turn out to be the best choice overall, and for me at least, that has been true.

HW: What other clients have you used (and why did you stop)?

I’ve used pretty much everything. In the Mac OS 9 days, I was a rabid fan of Claris Emailer. I went through a Eudora phase, but eventually I got too frustrated with its odd interface and endless proliferation of windows. I also used Entourage for a while, and liked it well enough, but kept getting annoyed by little details that bugged me (but that Mail got right). I still open Entourage or Thunderbird in a while, when Mail does something wonky and I want a second opinion. Since I use IMAP almost exclusively, it’s never any problem to pop into another client and back again.

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

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Here is the first of an email interview series with developers, bloggers and others on Apple Mail and how they use it…..

Scott Morrison has an M. A. in Educational Technology and teaches Computer Sciences at a high school in Montreal. In the evenings, he tries to transform himself into a developer of Mail plug-ins.

His first Mac was the original Mac 128k in 1984, and he has been a die hard Mac user since. His current rig includes a Powerbook G4 -500 and an iMac intel duo-Core 1.83. He loves a good scotch and in his other spare time makes beer and mead.

Mail Act-On and MailTags are his first forays into Cocoa/Objective C programming (and probably the most ambitious and widely-used of all the Mail.app plugins).

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

SM: Off and on since OS 10.0, but exclusively since January 2005. I’ve used Entourage which I found slow (Office 2001) and too “Microsofty”, and Thunderbird, which was a great client, but a little buggy in bits and not fully integrated in to the OS X environment (such as Spotlight and addressbook).

I made the switch back to Mail because I was looking forward to using Spotlight and Smart Mailfolders. Once I started developing plug-ins, I kept eating my own dog food. I also use First Class Client but that is only for work.

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

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