Over the three years or so that I have been using Mail.app (and mistreating it by loading every tweak, script and plugin I can find), I’ve seen it weird out in lots of ways.

Phil Sherry has posted a photo in his Flickr photostream which tops my list of bizarre behaviours.

Maybe he puts it best: “Mail.app just freaked out on me.”

My first hunch is that it is some kind of font corruption. What do you think? Ever seen this sort of thing before?mail.app, apple mail, weird, font, menu corruption, problems, unhappy users

Ashish Gulhati, CEO of email service provider Neomailbox , decided to dump Mail and give Thunderbird another try.

At first glance, he was impressed with the improvements since he last used it twelve months ago.

He even got inspired enough to list Thunderbird’s pros and cons. In short, he concluded, the Mozilla client “sure seemed to surpass Mail.app in terms of bleeding edge features.”

Then the rot set in and Thunderbird’s charms began to fade:

OK, so Thunderbird managed to delete a lot of my recent mail. Luckily, Mail.app had cached a copy of most of the messages. I’m also quite sick of Thunderbird’s frequent crashes, horrible search, flaky filters, and general instability. I’m switching back to Mail.app!

Sure, Thunderbird has all the bleeding edge bells and whistles, but none of the features work trouble-free, not even basic, core functionality. In the final analysis a mail program that works reliably at what it does is way more useful than one which has all the latest features, but nothing works.

Like the hare and the tortoise, Thunderbird streaks ahead in the comparison shootout at first, but slow and steady wins the race:

In the final analysis Apple’s Mail.app is still probably the most reliable, responsive, usable and full-featured email program available for OS X, or any platform for that matter.

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Kim Cavanaugh and Fraser Speirs are both feeling strangely unsettled and unhappy with Mail.app. Somehow the love is fading.

Kim finds that Mail treats their relationship with less respect than it once did. Now it lets all sorts of spam into his Inbox.

Now back in the day, those would have gone directly into the Junk folder. But not now. Something has changed. Somehow you just don’t seem to care anymore.

Fraser can’t put a finger on his dis-ease. Mail.app, he says, has simply been “behaving atrociously for me over the past couple of days”.

And he is not confident that a better email client will ever emerge:

This is one area where Apple’s involvement has not benefited consumers because Apple’s offering is uncharacteristically poor. There is some demand for such a product and I’m sure there are developers able to build a good mail client. Unfortunately, Apple’s presence in the market with an almost-good-enough free product makes it an exceptionally risky investment for any company.

Of course one never knows what’s just around the corner. It’s possible that Leopard will fix all Mail’s ills and give it a fresh injection of life. Who knows. Communication with the user community is not a strong point with the Mail Development Team.

As far as I know there are only two other hopes on the horizon. Allan Odgaard of TextMate fame has hinted that a friend of his is working on a new email client. If Allan is involved, I’d have high hopes for the finished product.

Matt Ronge is also working on a new IMAP-focussed mail client, Kiwi.

As a hard-core email client monogamist, I’m never tempted to stray. Even in deepest Mail.app IMAP hell, I know the relationship is making me a better person. As the good book says,

suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.

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François Joseph de Kermadec, who posts on the O’Reilly MacDevCenter site, got quite a fright from Mail.app today:

Today, Mail went postal (hmm, do I chalk up that one as a bad pun or coincidental wording?) on me. Deleting a message would make it reappear. Moving anything would duplicate it. Corruption crept everywhere, in subtle ways. Nothing was really reproducible but nothing was totally random either. In other words, hell.

As a result, he is giving up on Mail with a mixture of anxiety and hope.

The rest of his post is an interesting tour through the innards of Mail.app’s Mail folder, weighing the good and bad things about its organisation and arguing that the app’s development has brought about too much complexity:

To me, Mail’s facade is the best of all Mac OS X applications out there. The way it thinks about mails, the way organizes them. But looking into its Mail folder just shows how it has evolved and, more importantly, how dramatically it did, with no signs of slowing down. Too much in too little time, really. For example, should a crucial application like an email client rely on the first version of system-wide frameworks (I’m thinking Spotlight here)? Should an application take it upon itself to create an SSL-capable account automatically upon first startup without turning SSL on and without giving the user a chance to stop sending the password in the clear (.Mac indeed)?

He’s not sure what client to switch to. And there’s the rub. For all its quirks, it’s hard to beat Mail.app as the most satisfying email client out there. Not least, the control it gives to users through an abundance of plugins is unparalleled.

He’ll be back.mail.app, apple mail, plugins, mail folder, unhappy users, switching

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

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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