I’ve been looking for a good mail client for Mac OS 10. Apple Mail is pretty close to what I’m looking for: it’s simple, it works, and it’s got a great spam filter. However, it hides a bit too much in the background, has no option to change from the default top-posting behavior to email replies, and makes it difficult to feed witty sayings into an email signature, either via a program or a fortune file.

So, thus began the Great Email Client Search.

I started with GNUMail.app. It’s based off of the same essential NextSTEP framework that Mac OS, and thus Apple Mail is based on. It’s rather nice in a hackish sense, to tell you the truth, and on Linux, I think it just may be the best-in-class GUI mail application. However, it lacks the Growl notification I’d prefer to use, so any incoming emails can be seen, and thought “I’ll take care of that now”, or “I’ll take care of that when I take care of email as a whole.” The mail program itself doesn’t come with a mail filter, but Eric Raymond’s bogofilter appears to do a fine job of filtering emails. Basically, an all-around winner, except for the lack of built-in growl support, and lack of a reply-all button (WTF?).

I also looked into Mulberry. No easy signature support. Dumped. The interface is… complex. It reminds me of AutoCAD. For me, an email client should be streamlined and let you do one thing very well: read email. This was cluttered, and if I wanted all sorts of extra doo-dads, I’d just pick another mail client.

There’s MS Entourage, which comes with Office:Mac 2004, and while it’s not terrible, it’s Big, and it’s a power-pc app, which means it’ll kill my battery life via Rosetta emulation on my Intel MacBook. It also won’t do the fancy signatures thing (Really, how hard can it be?).

So, I hauled out Thunderbird. It doesn’t sync with the OS X Address Book by default, doesn’t use Growl by default, and won’t do interesting signatures. I found a version with OS X Address Book support (It’s not the Blessed And Holy Thunderbird Release, so it doesn’t use any of the Mozilla trademarks), and found extensions to do the rest. It doesn’t have the nifty unified inbox like Apple Mail has, but in other respects, it seems alright in its latest rendition; it’s still my mail client of choice on Linux and Windows.

Categories: Geeky Peawee
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