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.

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