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Which email program do you use on your Mac?
1/1: Which email program do you use on your Mac?
Other polls | 4,251 votes | 46 comments
Apologies in advance...
If I left your personal favorite email app out of the list ... there are only so many poll choices available, so I had to skip a few to make the rest fit...
multiple choice
You listed all the ones I normally use all right, but the poll only can allow for voting for one!
Spymac
I no longer am connected to the internet from home. When I was, I used Mail. Now that I am not, I use Spymac. When iTools changed to .mac, I wasn't about to pass $160 (Cdn) to Apple to continue with a web-based e-mail account. Spymac started up to fill the void.
Why Use anything else
I love pine and mutt, use them still on a few mail servers. Outside of the host-based mail clients why would you use anything else other than mail.app ?
Why? Speed
I can search for a message in roughly 1/10th of the time it takes Mail.app to find it. I can switch folder full of messages (literally 1000's of them) almost instantly. I can quickly access multiple mailservers and retrieve my mail with out grinding things to a halt and then filter them all quickly.
Why? Speed
I can switch folder full of messages (literally 1000's of them) almost instantly.I have a folder with 11000+ messages. Switching to that folder takes less than a second, so I wouldn't say that Mail.app is that slow. :-)
Why Use anything else
Why? O Mutt, how I love thee, let me count the reasons why...
Sure, Mutt isn't as pretty as Mail.app, and I like to use OS X apps wherever possible. But the reasons listed above are the main reasons I've chosen to use Mutt instead. The only real drawback is lack of support for HTML mail.. However, that is easily fixed with a simple key binding to pass the e-mail to Safari. And I get very few legitimate HTML messages anyway. :)
mutt, et.al.
I might be using mutt if its IMAP support were more complete. I've primarily used Mulberry for several years now, first on Solaris and on OS X since late 2001. The mulberry-discuss list is an excellent resource, full of helpful, interesting, insightful topics.
mutt, et.al.
Right now my ideal e-mail program would be a combination of features and interface from Mulberry, Apple Mail, Gmail (beta), and mutt. In other words, your ideal e-mail program is Pine. And yes, I agree, it's wonderful :-) ---
mutt, et.al.
Pine's UI leaves much to be desired. AFAIK keybindings still can't be cutomized. And when I tried v3.x it felt too "modal". Hard to imagine anyone who's used mutt extensively being able to tolerate Pine's "rigid" interface.
mutt, et.al.
You mention Pine's lack of keybinding flexibility as if that's a bad thing, but really, why would that be a good thing? I don't want a mystery meat UI; I want clear, consistent behavior and preferably would prefer to have good documentation for that behavior. Pine's keybindings -- much of which is inherited from Emacs -- are clear, well thought out & documented, and predictable. I have better things to do with my time than try to come up with a different set, ya know? :-) And Pine 3.x is ancient history by now. The program had already reached 4.00 by 1998, and as of last month is on 4.60. If you're going to compare to Mutt, then be consistent: Mutt didn't even exist until the end of 1998. Moreover, Mutt has been updated four times in the past two years, while Pine has had nine releases that brought it from 4.44 to 4.60 (with big changes at 4.5x & 4.6x) in the same span of time. It would appear that the Mutt users are two wrapped up in coming up with new keybindings to make much useful progress with their software, eh? :-) Really though, Mutt has the reputation as the "flexible" mail client while Pine is perceived to be the "training wheels" one, but having spent time using both, it seems to me that Pine is at least as flexible in any ways that count (better IMAP support, etc) and is far less confusing to use. I've seen little if anything that a Mutt user could do that couldn't be done in nearly as few keystrokes in Pine (not counting cheating like binding a series of commands to one keystroke, which Pine obviously doesn't allow), to the point that the practical differences between the two are negligible, and the clearer, more consistent UI in Pine becomes a real advantage -- at least to me. In any case, the only obvious thing is that they're both better than nearly any GUI mail client. Talk about training wheels! Sheesh! :-) ---
mutt, et.al.
I like Pine and I use it when I have to deal with remote IMAP boxes. However, its inability to deal with Maildir boxes means I won't be using it as my primary user agent, at least for now. (Or at least I don't think that it can do Maildir, as much as I've tried... correct me if I'm wrong.) I've always seen mbox as a very fragile format; I'm much more comfortable keeping my important mail in a Maildir folder, regardless of the (mild) performance loss associated with the format. So, it's Mutt for me.
HTML mail in mutt
oooooh...actually you can use mutt's MIME autoview to show rendered HTML inline.
links provides the rendering. It's colorful and pretty. I'm also set up to have HTML display in my default GUI browser, though I realize that I rarely used that. Reading it layed out in Terminal was enough. I used to use mutt a lot more, now that we have Thunderbird and Mail.app has gotten better, I still use it for local mail. I based what I did on Gary Johnson's work, and modded it for OS X. Replaced w3m with links, and modified his mutt_netscape script to use the default browser. Made handlers for image attachments to go to GraphicConverter, and that sort of thing. mutt is fun.
re: Why Use anything else?
I stopped using Apple Mail after it corrupted some of my mailboxes. I had moved over to Mail after my Entourage mail database got similarly corrupted. Now I'm back on Eudora, and will never switch again!
re: Why Use anything else?
What happens if Eudora corrupts your mail? :P
Reviews?
Nice list of mail apps, more than half of which I wasn't aware of. Maybe what we need somewhere is a review of some of the more obscure ones. I love Mail.app, but there are plenty of things that I would welcome in an alternative mail client, if I knew about them...
iPine?
Wouldn't it be nice to have Pine with the GUI rewritten in Cocoa.
iPine?
The university of washington imposes licensing limitations, so you can't (afaik) release such a program without a lawyer.
Mutt GUI?!
I tried googling for this, but I can't seem to find it...
Mutt GUI?!
What is it? It's my mistake :). Mutt was only supposed to be listed once, but I got confused while cutting and pasting the list around -- I'd listed it twice, thinking there was a GUI version, and meant to cut this one. It's now been cut, and the vote that it had was given to Mutt [UNIX].
Two
I actually use two interfaces: mail app by Apple and Yahoo.
Two
.mac surely does have a web interface, and it's not bad at all. Doesn't do much, other than read and write mail, but then what would you expect?
It's $99. How do you feel about that?
I quite like .mac - does anyone have any comments? Is it worth the subscription? I like the iMovie hosting thing. Childish, yeah. Simplistic, yeah. Fun? Yeah. It really all depends on how much $99 sticks in your craw. Some people see that as exorbitant; others see is as well worth it, and for varying reasons: the mac.com email address itself, the free stuff and discounts that come along during the year, the web integration with the iApps and Backup, & iDisk being those that I value. Myself, after availing myself of the $49 price for iTools users, I vowed I would not renew the second year unless they lowered the price. Well, they didn't, but I did, although I did get a $20 discount for referring one other user who adopted .Mac. So far I feel I have gotten a good deal for what I paid. Would I rather it was free or at least half the cost? Sure. Can I promise I will sign up the year I have to pay full price? No. But I'm enjoying it and the useful integration for the modest things I do. Check it out: homepage.mac.com/pchien, or .../uaug. One thing I must say: Kudos to Apple for making it possible to incorporate HTML pages one has created "by hand" in HomePage. Haven't tried it yet, but it makes HomePage itself potentially three times as useful for many people without compromising the novice's ability to use HomePage. --Books
.Mac HomePage
I wish it were possible to assign an alias to a .Mac account for HomePage access instead of having to use the name part of the @mac.com e-mail address. Same with iChat.
.Mac HomePage
You could add an email-only account for 10$ (I think?) and use the main .mac name for the web stuff. Come to think of it, you can add aliases for free - you still might get some spam to the main address you'd have to weed through, but you could filter it out in a mail client.
Eudora -> Mail.app for this boy
I've been using Eudora forever, seemingly, and I really liked and trusted its new Junk Mail filter. However there's two points I hate about it:
Entourage by choice?
I'm curious how many of those 1 in 10 (or more) readers who use Entourage (or Outlook in Classic) do so because they need access to particular services at the office, and would otherwise use another mail client. Not an anti-Microsoft rant (per se), but I am curious how Microsoft's dominance in office apps (and, frankly, in most IT departments) affects what software people use. After all, unlike Word and Excel, this poll makes clear that there really are numerous realistic options for e-mail clients outside of a few large vendors. (Not that that doesn't prevent most of us from using Apple's Mail.app — including yours truly. Another argument for bundling affecting choice, I guess.)
Had e-mail protocols not existed prior to Microsoft emerging at the dominant software company in the world, one must wonder whether an e-mail standard that wasn't a proprietary, closed Microsoft format (again, think Word, Excel, etc.) would have ever existed. Or whether e-mail — largely like instant messaging now — could not cross proprietary networks. Imagine how different communication would be today in that world....
Entourage, most definitely by choice
While there are undoubtedly going to be folks who use Entourage in order to access corporate Exchange servers, such users appear to be in the minority. The majority made a conscious choice to pay for Office just to enjoy the many advantages of using Entourage over Mail/iCal/AddressBook. The linking of mail, contacts, tasks, and calendar events in an integrated database stands out as one of the most important advantages, but there are numerous others. Personally, I've always been fond of Entourage for its impeccable handling of Japanese contact fields (you can thank Dan Crevier, former MacBU member, for those features). Entourage is also one of the most scriptable applications on the OS X platform, and the members of the Entourage mailing list are prolific producers of some of the slickest scriptwork I've ever seen. Anyway, I could go on and on, but I think everyone gets the point by now... :)
Entourage, most definitely by choice
Thanks for the question and response since it's something I've been curious about.
Entourage, most definitely by choice
I bought Office X soley for Entourage. It is the best email client I have ever used and not nearly as frustrating as mail.app (I used mail.app as my primary client from 10/2001 - early 2003). I recently uninstalled mail.app from my home eMac and installed Entourage there as well. I gave mail.app a fair trial (nearly 3 years), but it simply does not measure up to Entourage.
Entourage, most definitely by choice
For a long time, I was a hater of Microsoft in general. But with the new Entourage 2004, Microsoft has made one product that I absolutely love. The integration and other excellent features make it my e-mail client of choice.
Entourage by choice?
I use both Mail and Entourage - Mail's junk mail filterning is the best (most effective, most reliable) that I've seen to date (as far as clients go, that is). However, from a composition standpoint, Mail just isn't up to snuff.
Key bindings
Re: ... hop from one word to another by using cmd-arrow keys
I use (and prefer :-)) Emacs-style option-f [moveWordForward] and option-b [moveWordBackward] keybindings for that sort of functionality in Cocoa apps. See Key bindings for technical information and examples.
Entourage by choice?
such as the ability to hop from one word to another by using cmd-arrow keys, just like in Word That's option-arrow keys in Mail, just like every Mac application I've used except Word since OS 7. cmd-arrow keys go to the beginning and end of the current line.
Outlook in Classic
Well, since Entourage v.X and 2004 depend on Exchange 2000sp3 or better, I'm still stuck with Outlook 2001 in Classic for connectivity to our Exchange 5.5 environment.
Accessing Mail.app data from other programs
I have a PC that sit's next to my iMac - what I want to be able to do is telnet/ssh into my mac, and read my email from the command line.
Accessing Mail.app data from other programs
Yes.
Mail Brain Dead
I can not believe so many of you use Apple Mail..
Marking a message as important
From the menus: Message -> Mark -> As Flagged. Tada.
Mail Brain Dead
I used Apple's Mail because it was included with the system software, not to mention - free. Being a single home user, it was all I needed for my purposes.
Mail Brain Dead
Well, for starters I use this ---
Mail Brain Dead
Well, jeez. I don't! If a mail is important, I respond to it or act on it immediately; if it's not, I don't.
The best email program of them all!
I can't believe I didn't have the option of choosing Claris Emailer 2 !!!!
The best email program of them all!
Ha... I loved Claris Emailer back in the day. Then we switched to Outlook Express for a while... then Entourage... now I use Mail.app for everything. It works, it is pretty, just does what I want.
Re: The best email program of them all!
I've never touched Emailer, but I used Organizer for some time before I discovered that Palm Desktop was basically carbonized Organizer.
AppleMail lack of searching capabilities
I like Apple Mail in pretty much all respects - but I can't believe that Apple still hasn't addressed the woeful lack of a searching interface in AppleMail. As far as I know, you can only search on ONE condition (From=foobar or Subject contains Blah, or whatever) - Netscape Mail allows you to search on a lot of conditions ANDed or ORed together. Since I keep most of my important stuff in my email, it's a problem that I can't search it very well. |
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