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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