I've been experimenting with various e-mail clients over the past few years, and have generally found at least one major problem with pretty much all of them. (Thunderbird no longer supported, Postbox is unstable & disobeys it's own config settings, AirMail fails to show all my mail).
I thought I would go back to Mac Mail to see if it had improved since I last tried it.
I use a network diagnostic tool called Little Snitch to determine network port & data usage, which is really useful to see how mail clients do their job.
What I have found is that Mac Mail is really, really "chatty" with the mail servers, and does a massive amount of data syncing even for accounts that should already be fully "populated" after initial downloads. All of my accounts are IMAP, so everything should already be on the server, and require minimal data transfer.
You can also open the Mail Activity window to see what it the app is doing at any given instant. It seems to spend a large portion of its time connecting to mail servers, and trying to cache messages that should already be on the system.
I don't know whether this behaviour is due to the configuration of my mail servers (the main one is my corporate IMAP, plus 3 Google accounts, iCloud & Hotmail), but Mail seems to be "active" - and using data - for most of the time.
Mail also takes at least 30 seconds to actually display my new mail after startup, and also takes about the same time to shut down after telling it to quit.
I finally decided to give MS Outlook a go, which I have had installed with MS Office, but never used. I'm normally a bit an Apple Fanboy and consider the MS products sub-optimal, but in this case I have been hugely impressed by how well Outlook works with my accounts.
Firstly, it starts really quickly.
It doesn't have the same chattiness of Mac Mail, and generally only seems to be active at the scheduled times (for IMAP folder sync)
The big, big plus for me is that I can configure it to only download mail message headers. I have lots of busy accounts, and I don't want to download message bodies except for my principal inbox. There seems to be no way to configure this in Apple Mail.
Because of this, Outlook uses less than a tenth of the data used by Mac Mail, which is a huge consideration when you are using cellular data. I also don't fill up my precious SSD space with mail message bodies that I will never read.
The only significant downside I can see is that MS and Apple have dropped the ball on synch between Outlook and Mac OS X contacts and calendars. These are now synched through iCloud, and Outlook can't connect to this. I can live with this for the benefits of not constantly hammering the network.
Has anyone seen any improvements in Yosemite Mail?
I also highly recommend Little Snitch as a monitoring tool. You won't believe how many network requests on myriad ports are sent by your software to unknown servers - it's scary!
I thought I would go back to Mac Mail to see if it had improved since I last tried it.
I use a network diagnostic tool called Little Snitch to determine network port & data usage, which is really useful to see how mail clients do their job.
What I have found is that Mac Mail is really, really "chatty" with the mail servers, and does a massive amount of data syncing even for accounts that should already be fully "populated" after initial downloads. All of my accounts are IMAP, so everything should already be on the server, and require minimal data transfer.
You can also open the Mail Activity window to see what it the app is doing at any given instant. It seems to spend a large portion of its time connecting to mail servers, and trying to cache messages that should already be on the system.
I don't know whether this behaviour is due to the configuration of my mail servers (the main one is my corporate IMAP, plus 3 Google accounts, iCloud & Hotmail), but Mail seems to be "active" - and using data - for most of the time.
Mail also takes at least 30 seconds to actually display my new mail after startup, and also takes about the same time to shut down after telling it to quit.
I finally decided to give MS Outlook a go, which I have had installed with MS Office, but never used. I'm normally a bit an Apple Fanboy and consider the MS products sub-optimal, but in this case I have been hugely impressed by how well Outlook works with my accounts.
Firstly, it starts really quickly.
It doesn't have the same chattiness of Mac Mail, and generally only seems to be active at the scheduled times (for IMAP folder sync)
The big, big plus for me is that I can configure it to only download mail message headers. I have lots of busy accounts, and I don't want to download message bodies except for my principal inbox. There seems to be no way to configure this in Apple Mail.
Because of this, Outlook uses less than a tenth of the data used by Mac Mail, which is a huge consideration when you are using cellular data. I also don't fill up my precious SSD space with mail message bodies that I will never read.
The only significant downside I can see is that MS and Apple have dropped the ball on synch between Outlook and Mac OS X contacts and calendars. These are now synched through iCloud, and Outlook can't connect to this. I can live with this for the benefits of not constantly hammering the network.
Has anyone seen any improvements in Yosemite Mail?
I also highly recommend Little Snitch as a monitoring tool. You won't believe how many network requests on myriad ports are sent by your software to unknown servers - it's scary!