The poster at The Spam Chronicles is looking at how various programs and services handle (or don’t handle) spam.

First off, he compares Mail and Thunderbird by testing how well they process 109 spam emails released from his Gmail account.

The junk controls on both clients were reset at the start of the test.

He discovered that Mail flagged 42 of them as spam and missed 67 for a 39% success rate. Thunderbird faired better: it flagged all 109 as spam when its junk mail controls were run on the Inbox.

He them tried again with 61 spam emails from his Yahoo account and found that Mail.app “flagged 23 as spam while delivering 17 to the inbox for a 56% success rate” while Thunderbird again flagged them all when its filter was run on the Inbox.

He concludes:

Apple Mail starts with a more conservative approach in order to avoid falsely flagging e-mail as spam. In Apple Mail the spam filter is on my default. Thunderbird starts off with an aggressive filter but the spam filter is off by default and must be enabled.

Of course, this is not a neutral statistical sample sound for all eternity, nor is it fair to judge the clients on untrained filters, but the result is still interesting.

In another post he compares how a wider variety of web-based and Desktop email clients handled a week of spam, covering Yahoo!, .Mac’s webmail, Gmail, AOL, Apple Mail, Thunderbird and more.

There he finds out that on “the first day Apple Mail caught 10 and missed 10 junk mails. After that initial training it improved dramatically catching 6 and missing 1.”

For .Mac, he makes a perceptive observation: “.Mac mail does not have any web based spam filter, at least not visible to the user”. Nonetheless, “typically, only 1/2 the junk email appeared in my mailbox”.mail.app, apple mail, thunderbird, email, spam, junk, gmail, aol, yahoo, dotmac, .Mac

Email Backup and its shareware version Email Backup Pro have been updated.

The more fully-featured Email Backup Pro (shareware, USD 9.95) has improved restore functions, including the ability to restore backups made with the freeware version.

Also, you can now launch a restore by clicking on the backup file in Finder.

It now also supports GyazMail .

The freeware version (1.1.2) now quits the email client first in order to produce a more reliable backup.

You can read more about these simple backup utilities on the developer’s web pages for Email Backup and Email Backup Pro .mail.app, apple mail, email, thunderbird, entourage, eudora, gyazmail, backup

A poster on MacOSXHints makes a good point about the new Gmail interface and Safari.

Although Gmail’s new right-hand menu doesn’t work in Safari, the keyboard shortcuts for the options it contains work fine.

And they are, of course, “r” for Reply, “a” for Reply All and “f” for Forward.

Keyboard shortcuts are great. Although the jury is still out on whether they actually make you faster or just make you feel faster, just feeling faster is good.

So, it’s worth expanding these three to include all the keyboard tricks in a nice, complete and printable list of Gmail shortcuts .

Or if you are a real Google fanatic, the Complete Google Apps Cheatsheet .

Desktop email client fanatics like me will find it useful to know about the Thunderbird one (PDF) , the Entourage cheatsheet (PDF) and the complete list of Apple Mail shortcuts (PDF). email, gmail, thunderbird, keyboard shortcuts, productivity, Apple Mail, mail.app, safari

Apple Matters has produced a walk-through on switching from Mail.app to Thunderbird using the emlx to mbox converter from CosmicSoft.

It covers all the steps from finding your Mail.app messages, converting, moving and importing them again and features some screenshots to help you on your way.

Perhaps the emlx to mbox converter has got smarter or perhaps the author was lucky, but he doesn’t mention any of the problems encountered by another user trying to do the same thing, which were posted on macOSXHints some time ago.

Needless to say, moving back the other way again from Thunderbird to Mail 2.0 will be easier and the outcome more pleasurable.mail.ap, apple mail, thunderbird, email, switching, mbox, emlx

David Carpe of Gmail Pro and passingnotes emails to say what an excellent app Eudora Mailbox Cleaner is, and how easily it helped him to move from Eudora for Windows to Mail.app on his new Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro.

In short, he says, Andreas Amann’s app is “flawless, perfect”, although he takes the opportunity to point out a few things.

In particular, he recommends patience:

The first part—dragging it all, setting up folders, etc, and then dragging the whole ‘Eudora folder’ onto the cleaner only took about an hour or so, but the script to rebuild boxes can take longer. It took me a couple of hours. Do NOT interrupt it. My advice is to turn off all other programs and just walk away and let it do it’s thing.

Secondly, he notes something specific to Eudora for Windows switchers:

For nicknames: Many Eudora for Windows users will be scratching their heads about ‘nndbase.txt’ in the instructions as it doesn’t exist in the new version. It’s actually a different file type. I pinged Andreas about this. What I did (and yes, this worked flawlessly) was drag the entire Eudora for Windows into the folder that I had created called ‘eudora folder’ (as per Andreas’ instructions). Then when I dragged that whole thing onto the cleaner the dialogue box popped up. I simply deselected everything except ‘import nicknames’ and voila, they were all inside my address book within about two minutes. I did this last, after doing all of my mail and attachments.

Anyone reading this and teetering on the edge, might like to know that Eudora Mailbox Cleaner also does a terrific job for people coming over from Thunderbird.

I’m not going to make any snide remarks about someone who runs a Gmail site switching to Mail.app. No, not one.

I’ll just join with him and many others in thanking the developers who make such great plugins and utilities available to normal users like me. Mail.app wouldn’t be half the app it is without them, and they don’t get thanked enough.

Soppy, but true.

“Thank you a million times over, Andreas,” David says.eudora for windows, thunderbird, mail.app, apple mail, gmail, email, switching, nicknames, kiss a developer day

Email Backup Pro is an easy to use backup utility for all the major Mac email clients: Apple Mail, Entourage x.V and 2004, Thunderbird, Eudora.

Its simple interface and “set-and-forget” features make it hard for a user to claim that creating a regular backup is too much hassle. (See an earlier, more extensive Hawk Wings review.)

There is only one new feature in the 1.1 release, but it’s a good one—support for multiple email clients:

Email Backup Pro costs USD 9.95 and a demo version (with scheduling disabled) is available from the developer’s web site .email, backup, restore, apple mail, mail.app, eudora, thunderbird, entourage

Thunderbird 1.5.0.8 is out.

While the release itself contains no new features, only general stability improvements and security fixes (full list ), the release notes mention a number of bugs and known issues, some of which affect Mac users in particular.

Four of the problems are described as known issues, the last of which may affect Intel Mac users:

1. If after you run the Thunderbird 1.5.0.8 installer, the extension compatibility and update wizard does not appear, go to the Extension Manager and manually check for updates.
2. If the Extension Compatibility and Update wizard appears but does not complete, first try to focus some other window and return focus to the wizard. If that does not correct the problem, hit Cancel and go to the Extension Manager and manually check for updates.
3. If the Extension Compatibility and Update wizard downloads and installs extension updates but those updates are not applied, open the Extension Manager and manually check for updates.
4. On Intel-based Macintosh computers, PowerPC-only binary extensions do not work unless users upgrade to an Intel-native or Universal version or turn on Rosetta. To turn on Rosetta, click on the Thunderbird icon, click “Get Info” and then check the “Run Under Rosetta” box.

Two more potential Mac-specific issues are detailed in the notes:

1. If you are running Thunderbird 1.5 or Thunderbird 1.5.0.2 on Macintosh computers with Intel Core processors under Rosetta, you will get upgraded to a PowerPC-only, Thunderbird 1.5.0.8 product via the automated update system. You will need to download the Thunderbird 1.5.0.8 Universal Binary build from www.mozilla.com to take advantage of the native support for Intel-based Macintosh computers.
2. There is no Talkback on Intel-based Macs when running natively or under Rosetta. The Apple Crash report program should launch in the event of application crashes.

not apple mail, email, thunderbird, mozilla, bugs, problems, extensions manager