Alternatives to Mac Mail

[saturnotaku]

I'm probably one of the few people here who likes Outlook. The Office 365 subscription is actually worth the money for me because I can have copies installed on my Windows and OS X partitions, as well as on my wife's and parents' computers. The extra 20 GB of SkyDrive space has been a boon, too. I also got my subscription key card for well under the MS recommended retail price.

 

[Jesse-Mac]

Mac Mail and "Smart" mail, what are the alternatives?

I've only recently converted to Mac. I don't like the Mac Mail application, and find it thoroughly confusing having SO MANY folders and boxes. I hate having more than one folder with the SAME mail in it too. I don't want a regular inbox and also a SMART inbox. Outlook express on my old PC was much easier and I felt I could arrange it any way I wanted. Is there a way to make Mac Mail simpler with fewer boxes or is there just another application that I can download and use that would be easier for me?

 

[freiheit]

(Mozilla) Thunderbird

There is no Mac mail application which is "perfect" for me (my all-time favorite mail app was PMMail/2 for OS/2 back in the late 90s) but I have moved from Apple Mail (on 10.6 Snow Leopard) to Thunderbird which is a Mozilla (the Firefox people) project. It's the closest I've found to what I want in a mail client.

http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/

First, it imported my existing Apple Mail accounts, no problem. Second it lets me easily manage multiple email accounts as separate entities rather than jumbling everything into a single Inbox and a single Sent box. Third it supports GnuPG mail signing and encryption via the Enigmail add-on. Fourth it supports mail filters for e.g. moving incoming mail to a certain folder based on sender or subject, etc. And fifth, it works nicely with both POP and IMAP mail servers (both of which I use). Oh and sixth it is free (both as in beer and as in speech) and is available on Mac, Windows and Linux (and perhaps more) in case I ever have need to use another system.

 

[Jesse-Mac]

about thunderbird

Checked out the Mozilla Thunderbird email site. They say you can even make up your own personal email and .com? Is that safe? Is it easier to hack?

 

[freiheit]

Personalized email addresses

Checked out the Mozilla Thunderbird email site. They say you can even make up your own personal email and .com? Is that safe? Is it easier to hack?

I haven't used that feature, but I found this site which explains that they are just working through an established email service and domain name registrar provider. In the US for instance it says they use Hover. There's likely no security concerns with this beyond the normal concerns with any company hosting your email. It's a full, valid email account, it's just through Hover instead of Yahoo, GMail, Hotmail, etc.

 

[flightmedic]

I use Outlook 2011. My only complaint is that contacts don't sync so it's difficult to integrate contacts with messages and FaceTime.