Khoi Vinh has had enough . Although he is a long-time Entourage user and finds that the app is “a class act” that “frequently showcased the very best of what Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit had to offer”, he’s dumped it. It was just too slow and the new Intel Mac version too far away.

He’s liking his new email client, Mail.app, a lot:

There may be a fantastic new iteration of Entourage in the works, but I need a fast, nimble and Intel-friendly email client today. So I’ve switched over entirely to Apple’s Mail; there’s just no arguing with its lightning fast search performance, its Mac OS X native fit and finish, and the fact that it’s available right now.

Of course, there are some things that he doesn’t like. The perfect email client is yet to appear. In particular Mail’s Smart Mailboxes don’t seem so smart to him.

But it has proved the right move. Most of all, he’s loving the improvement with IMAP accounts:

Mail is very responsive with IMAP, to the point where it’s a nearly seamless experience, more or less exactly how IMAP was intended to work. This allows me to move easily between work and home computers while keeping my mail database in sync, and without effort. Brilliant.

mail.app, apple mail, entourage, microsoft, imap, junk, switcher, email, smart mailboxes

Mindless Fluffiness doesn’t like Mail.app much.

In fact, he thinks it’s so bad that he cannot fathom “why people go on about Apple’s great software”.

He has a list of eight grievances, which I’m going to reproduce in full:

1. They broke the ability to bind a key sequence to applescript in latest version
2. Earlier versions failed to check the certificate name of server in SSL connections
3. Can’t filter to display only unread messages
4. Does not spell check the Subject line when spell checking rest of message
5. Can’t include folder name in filter rule criteria
6. Search does not seem to use Spotlight
7. You can choose to check spelling when you send, or to have red squiggles under misspelled words – however you can’t have both. This is “upgrade” from pervious version where you could not spell check on send at all.
8. If you have two email address for a person, no way to set the preferred one.

No one respects the right of people to have an opinion, to use NotifX, to say Mail sucks or whatever more than I do.

Still, I can’t help mentioning:

1. Quicksilver triggers or FastScripts offer excellent workarounds for this.

3. A Smart Mailbox with the condition “Message is Unread” achieves this nicely.

6. Mail uses its own database for searches involving To, From, and Subject lines. For everything else it uses Spotlight. Scott Morrison , the developer of Mail Act-on and MailTags, has written a nice, simple explanation of searches in Mail.

8. Address Book allows you to set a default email address for people with more than one.

That still leaves four.

But a happy relationship with an email client is like the love of a good woman. It’s the art of compromise.mail.app, apple mail, searching, smart mailboxes, address book, unhappy users

Boris Anthony is one of those people who is always thinking about how Mail.app could be better.

In the past, he has wondered about how to Mail could be better integrated with iCal and how Spotlight searches in Mail could be smarter.

Today he wishes that his smart mailboxes were smarter. At least, that they would tell him the number of emails in each folder, not just the number of unread ones.

And he mocks up an image of what that would look like.smart mailboxes, hacks, message counts, mail.app, apple mail

Merlin Mann has served up another cracker post in his Inbox Zero series. He points out the importance of interrogating every piece of email that enters your inbox. Don’t assume it’s important. Don’t feel obliged to reply just because someone sent it to you. Don’t do the Pavlov’s Dog thing.

Rather, he suggests, ask each email as it comes in:

1. What does this message mean to me, and why do I care?
2. What action, if any, does this message require of me?
3. What’s the most elegant way to close out this message and the nested action it contains?

Of course, Merlin crafts it all with characteristic verve and wit, so you should read the whole post.

Learn how your emails to Merlin only have a 50% chance of making it past the first question. It’s a jungle out there.

On macOSXHints, sap.1 outlines a simple but clever way to use Address Book, Spotlight, and Smart Mailboxes in Mail.app to stay on top of a particular set of email obligations. It involves using the power of Smart Mailboxes to sort and present emails in a helpful and efficient way.mail.app, apple mail, tips, email, triage, spotlight, address book, smart mailboxes, productivity

MacGeekery has posted a piece on smart mailboxes.

It explains what smart mailboxes are, how they don’t really “contain” emails and how, in fact, they don’t even really exist.

It also shows you how to use them to search your email most efficiently and quickly by using information stored in Mail’s own database rather than relying on Spotlight.

After digesting that, you could move on to Joe Kissell’s MacWorld article on Smart Mailboxes for more tips and tricks.

[Via TUAW ]smart mailboxes, spotlight, envelope index, sqlite, mail.app, apple mail, joe kissell

A Hawk Wings reader emails to ask:

The mailboxes I have in Mail.app, they’re sorted alphabetically. But I’d like to order them so that personal mailboxes are at the top, and business mailboxes are at the bottom. Do you know if there’s a way to do this?

Good Question.

The Mailbox Drawer lists your Inbox and other “Special Folders” first, then your smart mailboxes and then your local folders.

You can re-order your smart mailboxes by dragging and dropping, but the local folders are always listed in descending alphabetical order.

This is not useful if your most used or most important folders start with letters further down the alphabet.

I know of two ways to change this:

You can add a number to the front of each mailbox that will force them to order in the way that suits your workflow best.

Or you can add spaces to the front of each one, which looks a bit nicer.

The number of spaces that you need will vary. In the image above the top mailbox has three spaces in front of it, the next one two and the last one one. Then the normal alphabetical ordering kicks in.

“Getting Things Done” (GTD) people may be glad to hear that the @ symbol also kicks folders to the top of the list.

These work for me, although I am always glad to hear of other ideas (UPDATE which you can find in the comments).mailbox sorting, workflow, alphabetical, GTD, productivity, Mailbox Drawer, smart mailboxes, tips, mail.app, apple mail

UPDATE: 10 May 2007 — Looks like the post has vanished.

Neil Dixon at a minor technicality discovered that his Mail.app was crashing because one of his smart mailboxes became corrupted.

The smart mailbox mysteriously acquired three new bogus conditions. Removing those fixed the crashes.

As he points out, if you get Mail.app crashes without an error message, check your smart mailboxes for corruption before attempting anything more drastic.mail.app, apple mail, corrupt, smart mailboxes, tips