“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king”.

This saying is regrettably well-known to people like me who because they run a tech blog are regularly called upon by fellow workers (or worse, bosses) to fix interrupt conflicts on their PCs or discover why their Outlook 2000 Net Folders are not working properly.

It is also true of the recent macOSXhints poll data. The data is unsound in lots of ways, but in the absence of any other information, it’s the best we’ve got.

Hawk Wings reader Skid Kennedy, who is a retired engineer, kindly sent in an analysis of the two polls:

This makes some of the gains and losses easier to grasp. The big sleeper is GyazMail , a client to which I pay little attention because it doesn’t support IMAP. It saw a staggering 333% increase, rising from 23 users in the first poll to 181 in the second. Statisticians will rightly have their concerns, but this still seems like impressive growth over two years.

The AOL increase seems massively at odds with the anecdotal evidence, as Skid points out, and looks especially odd to me in a poll that I expect to be geek-heavy.

I am personally convinced (again largely by anecdotal evidence) that Thunderbird’s rise is due to the increased penetration of IMAP, Mail.app’s continued IMAP quirks and the similarity of interface that Thunderbird enjoys across platforms.thunderbird, mail.app, apple mail, gyazmail, IMAP, AOL, email, mail clients

Perhaps it is a personal hang-up. Perhaps Switchers (like reformed smokers) feel more strongly about this than long-term users.

Whatever the cause, somehow it all just feels so very, very wrong:

Click the image for a larger view — if you dare!

Thanks to the wonders of virtualization, I’ve been getting to know Outlook again.

After that, I’ll probably move on and see if anything interesting has happened to PocoMail and PegasusMail , two old-favourites from my Windows days.

Then maybe Evolution on Ubuntu.

All of this is possible through the magic of the latest beta from Parallels Workstation . TUAW has a step-by-step tutorial on how to set it up.

I recommend giving it a try, if only for the nostaliga factor.outlook, virtualization, parallels workstation, Windows XP, pocomail, weird me out, email, mail clients