Matt Haughey is the founder of MetaFilter and Ask MetaFilter , PVRblog , Ten Years of My Life , and A Whole Lotta Nothing .

He is a designer and developer living near Portland, Oregon. He currently runs a new 20″ iMac G5 as his primary machine, with his 12″ powerbook demoted to traveling companion.

HW: How long have you been using Mail.app? What other clients have you used (and why did you stop)?

MH: I’ve been using Mail since April 2004. I started with Entourage on my first powerbook in early 2002, but it eventually got so slow I could no longer tolerate it.

HW: What plugins and extensions do you use to make your email experience better?

MH: The only one I’ve used is the one that makes the buttons look and act like Mail did pre-Tiger. [Mail Stamps.]

HW: What’s your favourite thing about Mail.app?

MH: The simplicity of it. There’s no wasted screen real estate or features I never use.

HW: What’s your pet hate about Mail.app?

MH: I wish searching was just a tad more robust. 8 years ago, Eudora let me search for any message that had an attachment that ended in .pdf that was sent from the domain of my accountant’s website. Apple Mail can’t do that, unfortunately, but I found MailSteward through your blog that can hopefully cover my search needs.

HW: If you could tell the Apple Mail development team one thing, what would it be?

MH: Make an advanced search option to do what I just described — let me search on two or three fields.

- - - -

You can read other interviews with developers and Mac identities talking about their Mail.app experiences by following this tag cloud link.

Related posts

• Talking Mail.app: Scott Morrison
• Talking Mail.app: Rui Carmo
• Talking Mail.app: Rob Griffiths
• Talking Mail.app: Pierre Igot
• Talking Mail.app: Peter Maurer

Rob Griffiths is the founder of macosxhints.com and is now a Senior Editor for Macworld , responsible for daily updates on macosxhints.com, as well as various projects for Macworld, both online and in print.

His primary machine is a first-generation Dual 2.0GHz G5 with 2.5GB of RAM.

HW: How long have you been using Mail.app? What other clients have you used (and why did you stop)?

RG: Since the 10.0 Public Beta. I had to use Entourage at work, and hated it. It just looked so ugly and felt cluttered, though I did like it’s three-column view. As soon as Mail gained Exchange support, I switched at work, too.

HW: What plugins and extensions do you use to make your email experience better?

RG: I’ve used many at various times, though presently I’m not running any.

HW: What’s your favourite thing about Mail.app?

RG: It’s got a nice, simple yet powerful interface.

HW: What’s your pet hate about Mail.app?

RG: Rules need to be more powerful.

HW: If you could tell the Apple Mail development team one thing, what would it be?

RG: Please improve the keyboard support; navigating via keyboard only is tricky at best right now.

- - - -

You can read other interviews with developers and Mac identities talking about their Mail.app experiences by following this tag cloud link.

Related posts

• Talking Mail.app: Scott Morrison
• Talking Mail.app: Rui Carmo
• Talking Mail.app: Pierre Igot
• Talking Mail.app: Peter Maurer
• Talking Mail.app: Michael Tsai

Brady J Frey is the founder and creative director of Dotfive and has a decade of print and web design experience. He is a well published writer of both fiction and journalism who is currently managing his company’s IT until he falls out of love with it.

It interests me especially that he uses Mail.app in an enterprise environment where other email clients are often preferred.

He uses a Dual 2 GHz PowerPC G5 with 4GB RAM running 10.4.4 on 250gb + 500gb internal harddive, backing up to a Lacie 500gb as needed; with *cough* 3rd Party Flat Panel displays.

HW: How long have you been using Mail.app? What other clients have you used (and why did you stop)?

BF: I was originally turned onto mail.app when I upgraded to Panther (very shortly after it was released). At the time I had been using a very buggy Entourage, and was looking for a robust alternative. Panther’s mail.app was very appealing from the get go — the clean icons (similar to Thunderbird), and most importantly the drawer that that would spawn a million alternative drawer[ed] applications. I had used Thunderbird, and while it had it’s pluses, namely stable interaction with Linux servers and extendability — it never has felt like a macintosh application should feel (nor does it play will with other macintosh applications).

For a short while I migrated to MailSmith from Bare Bones as well — but this application is more appealing to the developer in me, not the designer (as it is a text only mail application), and suffers from only POP support — once I embraced IMAP, I’ve never wanted to go back.

Entourage is another story in its own right — and I can thank its demise on my computer as a way of taking back my love for this OS. Its strong collaboration tools always seem to drag me back into at least attempting to make good use of its power… but it’s a flaky application on the IMAP front, its support for vCard standards is not full (though neither can Apple’s address book take that crown), it’s a completely unattractive and counter intuitive UI, weighed down by what seems to be lots of features, but no unified image. Every time I take two steps forward into resurrecting it, I always go five steps back.

HW: What plugins and extensions do you use to make your email experience better?

(more…)

Related posts

• Talking Mail.app: Scott Morrison
• Talking Mail.app: Rui Carmo
• Talking Mail.app: Rob Griffiths
• Talking Mail.app: Pierre Igot
• Talking Mail.app: Peter Maurer

Andrew Escobar is an undergraduate student studying Finance and the developer of Mail Stamps (a utility that removes the bizarre lozenge-shaped buttons in Tiger Mail) and Front Row Enabler .

His first Mac was a Macintosh Classic, but he was primarily raised on a PC.

He switched to the Mac in 2001, using a trusty 700Mhz Power Mac Quicksilver. He now uses a 1.25Ghz PowerBook, which is to be replaced by a MacBook Pro in September.

HW: How long have you been using Mail.app?

AE: I began to use Mail when I switched to the Mac platform, after falling in love with the PowerBook G4 and Mac OS X.

I used Mail in conjunction with the web-based Yahoo Mail until my account began being inundated with spam. I’ve been using Mail exclusively since I purchased my PowerBook in September 2003. I’ve been very happy with Mail since, and it’s yet to really give me a reason to look elsewhere for another email client.

In my PC years I put up with Outlook and Outlook Express out of pure ignorance.

HW: What plugins and extensions do you use to make your email experience better?

(more…)

Related posts

• Talking Mail.app: Scott Morrison
• Talking Mail.app: Rui Carmo
• Talking Mail.app: Rob Griffiths
• Talking Mail.app: Pierre Igot
• Talking Mail.app: Peter Maurer

Peter Maurer is a medical student who likes creating software for the mac in his spare time.

Peter’s spare time has yielded gems like Witch , Butler , Textpander, , Service Scrubber and more.

He uses a iMac G5 B (17 inches, 1.8 GHz, 1 GB RAM) which he says is, believe it or not, completely sufficient for programming.

HW: How long have you been using Mail.app? What other clients have you used (and why did you stop)?

PM: Ever since I’ve switched from OS 9 (was using Eudora back then) to OS X. I don’t quite remember exactly when I switched to OS X, but it was during the 10.0 era, so we’re probably talking about more or less five years here.

HW: What plugins, extensions and add-ons do you use to make your email experience better?

PM: None. I had installed some plug-ins (GPGMail for instance) in the past, but I’ve grown tired of tracking updates in order to keep those working.

HW: What’s your favourite thing about Mail.app?

PM: Actually, there are a few:

1. Never had to look at the manual — it’s that intuitive.

2. I like being able to choose colors for different kinds of mails — e.g., donations are green ;-)

3. Mail.app is free.

HW: What’s your pet hate about Mail.app?

PM: I’d like to have one trash for all my different e-mail accounts. Who needs a “Trash” folder with three trash cans inside?

HW: If you could tell the Apple Mail development team one thing, what would it be?

PM: Hire me ;-)

But seriously: I’d probably say “Good Work!”.

- - - -

You can read other interviews with developers and Mac identities talking about their Mail.app experiences by following this tag cloud link.

Related posts

• Talking Mail.app: Scott Morrison
• Talking Mail.app: Rui Carmo
• Talking Mail.app: Rob Griffiths
• Talking Mail.app: Pierre Igot
• Talking Mail.app: Michael Tsai

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?

(more…)

Related posts

• Talking Mail.app: Scott Morrison
• Talking Mail.app: Rob Griffiths
• Talking Mail.app: Pierre Igot
• Talking Mail.app: Peter Maurer
• Talking Mail.app: Michael Tsai