A better email program? Any suggestions?

A

aluminum

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I'm finally at the point where I am determined to find a good email application. Eudora is flaking out on me in OSX. OSX's mail app is buggy. Outlook Express I never REALLY liked. What's out there? What are my options?

I've taken a look at BB Mailsmith, and I like it, though there doesn't seem to be any HUGE feature improvements over the freebies to warrant the $70 price tag. I'm about to download Mulberry...has anyone used that?

Any other ones I should try out?

Ideally, it'd be great to have one that would sync with my Palm, too...but that appears to be a feature limited to only Outlook/Enterouge and Eudora.
 
Entourage v.X is not bad at all, but a tad expensive. Mail.app flakey? Don't see that here. If the feature set is enough for you, it's the best eMail app you'll get for the money (free, not even a download is needed).
 
Mail has really messed up some messages...as has Eudora (in fact, Eudora has ruined entire folders of messages). Mailsmith seemed to fix them, but, it's $70...if that's the best, so be it, I'll pay for it.

As for Enterouge, I like it, but it isn't meant for large amounts of email (neither outlook or Enterouge were meant for that, I've read.)
 
I've been using Eudora since it came out, both Os8.x and up and OS X and haven't had any problems with it.
 
As much as I hate to say it, I use Entourage exclusively. I need it for the office-reminders and calendar stuff. It's address but is as good as they get, and it handles email nicely. M$ did something right... tis a cold day in hell
 
How about pine?

Hahahahahahaha!

BTW, I don't like Mulberry at all.

-the valrus
 
I like mail very much, except for one crucial flaw:

It never fully deletes my POP mail cache from the server. So I have to clean it out about once a week with mail2web.com. By thursday, waiting times can become unbearable.:rolleyes:
 
Well, Bob...I've always like Eudora, so maybe you can shed some light on my problems.

Every so often, a mailbox would become corrupted. I'd have to reboot into 9, open Eudora in 9, and then fix it there, boot back, and then I'd be OK for a while.

However, this was happening all to often. So, finally, I just had to start over in OSX with new databases.

Things were OK until this last forced-beta version. I still use separate instances of the preferences folders to handle different POP accounts. This time, one of them works fine, the other just stopped working. I'd go to check mail, the checking mail dialog would flash for a split-second and nothing would happen. I could enter wrong passwords and the same would happen. I have absolutely no idea how to fix this, as the two preferences folders are identical.

Anyways, I've just tired of the problems and the perpetual beta-status of Eudora.

For you Enterouge users, how's it behave once you get large amounts of mail? Right now, in Outlook Express, once you get a few thousand emails, things begin to bog down when sorting and searching. I've always wanted to switch to Enterouge (mainly as a palm desktop replacement) but recently on Macintouch there were a few quotes directly from Microsoft where they stated that their email apps, save for Outlook, weren't meant for large mail accounts.

So, for now, I'm leaning towards mailsmith...I really just wish the price was a bit lower (but that's true of most software, I suppose ;o)

Also, I'm sure Mail 2.o will be great whenever Apple gets around to updating it. iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes (to a lesser extent) are all great Apple products that seem to get a lot of update-attention...why not Mail?
 
Mail works great for me. Simple, fast, and elegant, and it includes a spell checker. I can see how some people would want more features than Mail has to offer, but I've never found Mail to be "buggy" at all. I've never had any problem with it at all.
 
I did some research in the past...
I came across an app named Ginko.
Haven't checked it for a while.. take a look if you can, it was promising!
 
Well, I tried out Mulberry. Ugly. Really really ugly. So that's off the list.

Ginko looks like it will be great down the road, but it's still quite young and a little feature-shy.

So, I guess MailSmith is still the top runner.

Any other suggestions?
 
How about gnumail? It's Cocoa, supposedly has proper filter support (unlike Mail.app), and supports PGP.

http://www.collaboration-world.com/gnumail/

Don't really know what features you're after. Personally, I want a mail app that's not got too many features - nice and small. Mail.app is nice and small, but has the <i>wrong</i> few features for me...
 
My Feature list? Hmm...good question.

I guess the main one is that it WORKS and DOES NOT corrupt my email ever. I've had that problem with Mail.app and Eudora.

It should also have good filtering. Eudora's is OK, but frustrating in that you can only have two rules per filter, which is silly...especially when trying to do blanket filters like sorting SPAM.

It should have the ability to NOT show any embedded images in HTML emails (Eudora has this feature now).

It should handle LOTS of email. I currently have 3 accounts that get 100+ messages a day.

Good searching (Eudora's is great.)

And, finally, a good interface. Eudora's is OK...though I'm not a big fan of the multiple-windows that inevitably pop-up. I like Outlooks interface a bit better (in line with Mail and MailSmith).

BTW, Ginko has this great feature I haven't seen before. It threads your messages, so if there is an email conversation going back-and-forth, it can actually bundle those messages together for you...a great idea.

As a bonus, it would be great if it had complete Palm synchnronization with the address book...though I think that narrows it down to Eudora or Enterouge if I want that.

Off to try Gnumail!
 
I've been using PowerMail for 6 months now and have been very satisfied. Originally I got it so I could use the same app and database in OS X and OS 9. Now I hardly use OS 9, but I still prefer PowerMail to Mail.app. PM has great filtering possibilities and creating them is easy. It is also fully AppleScriptable, although I haven't looked into that.

Get it here: http://www.ctmdev.com/

The price is 49 USD.
 
Originally posted by aluminum
Also, I'm sure Mail 2.o will be great whenever Apple gets around to updating it. iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes (to a lesser extent) are all great Apple products that seem to get a lot of update-attention...why not Mail?
Click to expand...

Mail will be completely updated with the release of "Jaguar" (late summer): http://www.apple.com/macosx/newversion/
 
Mail.app is more than enough for me, although I won't say that you should use it because of this.

But xyz is right. Mail.app will get a total revamp in Jaguar, so be on the lookout. It IS 5 months away, but it will be a good update. Hopefully whatever e-mail program you use will be able to convert its mailboxes to Mail.app. :)

(You COULD just filch the Jaguar CD images from Hotline/Carracho and then use Mail.app 2.0b, but of course that would require 1. doing something illegal and 2. using beta software. ;) )

Here's the details on Mail.app "2.0":

Originally posted by MacNN
A new version of Mail will include new intelligent SPAM filtering, sophisticated "second-to-none" rules, auto merge mailboxes, cross-mailbox searching, improved color use (highlighting of message threads etc.), inline QT playback, and a better security model (with SSL/Kerberos/CRAM-MD5 support). The new SPAM, or junk mail, filter uses latent semantic matching through an analysis of the message text. New content searching also provided instant searching of multiple mailboxes and body text in each mailbox.
Click to expand...

and

Tevanian noted that improvements for Windows-to-Macintosh transition would include SMB browsing and sharing, built-in VPN (PPTP) support, Active Directory support (with home directory services) and better Exchange support in Mail.app.
Click to expand...
 
Well, call me skeptical, but those 'new' features seem like features that should have been in version one. Searching through multiple mailboxes? How was that not already implemented?

The Outlook support seems intriguing, though...do you think that Mail will be completely Outlook compatible? That would be very interesting indeed...and it may answer my need for calendering and palm synchronization too...

For now, though, I'm going to be test driving PowerMail and GNUMail.
 
Is anyone using GNUmail? If so, could you explain how to install it? I'd like to try it out but have no idea how to get it running.
 
I am using Entourage because of the calendar, tasks and notes... I can imagine better apps for mailing (sometimes just stops without a clear reason), but think I couldn't miss Entourage because it combines the features I need. I hope there will be an update soon that solves those stupid bugs.
 
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