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.

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Pierre Igot at Betalogue is frustrated by the not-very-smart algorithm that controls the way Mail threads messages. It doesn’t have to be as dumb as it is, he reckons:

As far as I know, Mail also uses unique e-mail message identifiers in the message headers to follow threads even when subject lines are changed. So it obviously can be smart in some cases. Why does it have to be so dumb in other cases?

He wishes that Mail had some kind of manual command to separate emails that Mail has mistakenly dumped together.

Kevin Bjorke, a Shading Engineer at NVIDIA, wonders why Mail.app won’t tell him what messages have been moved by its rules as Eudora does. “The program hides information from me and puts the burden of organization onto me to keep in my head — the opposite of what “productivity software” is supposed to do,” he says.

Rob Hyndman has just switched to Macs, buying a shiny new MacBook Pro. He is liking the whole experience , especially using Apple Mail:

Apple Mail is a joy to use on this box. Very simple, elegant, clean. I’m forgetting Outlook already :). But I do need to figure out proper archiving of emails. I have 5 years worth +, to about 5 gigs of email that I need to have handy and searchable.

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Bouncing off a TUAW post about the five most common mistakes made by beginning Mac users, Dan Warne wonders why Apple doesn’t make it easier for newcomers.

He also provides a pr?ɬ©cis of the comments posted in response to the TUAW article. As a switcher myself, it’s hard to read this without a self-knowing smile/wince.

My confession — No. 29. Ouch.

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Over at bombast.net, a switcher tells a long and torturous story of the move from Thunderbird to Mail.app.

Never did Eudora Mailbox Cleaner (which also works on Thunderbird mailboxes) seem so attractive. See Andreas’ comments in the Switching from Thunderbird entry.

A Hungarian blogger strikes problems importing his email from Opera 8 to Apple Mail.

This story made me wonder whether emailchemy which translates an astonishing number of mailbox formats into an astonishing number of mailbox formats, and is free for a “one off” use, works for Opera 8 as well versions 6 and 7.

After reading these stories, and I can say is that it is worth it in the end. Not very comforting, but true.

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