Trying to decide on mail application

Hi there,

So after my continued battle with making iCloud email work for my needs I caved and had my provider set up a Hosted Exchange account for me. Looking good on my iPhone so far.

Now I need to select he right mail app on my new Mac. So far have been using the generic Apple mail app with iCloud. It's rather meh but not bad either. however, after doing my homework here it seems that Mail and Exchange don't play well on Mavericks (and a fix is underway with 10.9.2 supposedly).

So - what to do? I must say I'm on the fence about signing up for Office 365 home. On the one hand it ain't cheap in the long-run and I hate making myself subject to constant upgrades and forced changes in my workflow (should have stayed away from the Mac world then, I know). Not a fan of subscription models because of that and just spent extra money to avoid it for my Adobe stuff. BUT - given that I could install it on a few machines in the house AND it being cross-platform actually makes it a decent deal. With that I could then install Outlook for every family member who needs it and call it a day. Never used Outlook for personal mail but have been using it at work for decades. So that would be ok.

Alternative is of course Thunderbird which has been my mail program of choice at home. It has it's quirks but at least I know them. Not sure though about the Mac version of it and how well it plays in the Mavericks/Exchange environment.

Options:

1. Set up Exchange in Mail, hoping for the best - maybe wait for the 10.9.2 update

2. Suck it up and buy Office 365 and use Outlook (does that actually work better or are there issues under Mavericks as well with Exchange?)

3. Alternative app such as Thunderbird


Bonus question: considering seamless calendar integration in those scenarios given that I currently use two Google calendars for the family stuff. Those integrate nicely on my iPhone, my wife's Thunderbird as well as my Calendar App on the Mac (syncing easily with Google Cal still). Moving to Outlook throws potentially a wrinkle into that - though as family we don't really need to send "invites" and other stuff that uses email to add or delete stuff from the calendar.

 

Good question. On the hosted exchange I currently get one address and one calendar. Not sure if I could add a second calendar without paying more. That may not be worth it. The google calendar (unlike a lot of their other stuff) I find actually quite nice.

I'll definitely check out the mail apps you mention. Just set up the Exchange address with Thunderbird on an old Windows machine (that was painful) and downloaded a trial for Office 365 that I'm now running on my Mac. Outlook was easy to set up with the Exchange address and looks and feels quite nice.

Excel and Word are ok on the Mac. Not great. But what's worse: the wife immediately nixed the Windows version of 365. Can't blame her. It looks garish with no way to change the way too bright backgrounds for example. Went straight back to her 2007. So paying for the 5-license annual subscription for one Mac seems silly given that the wife won't use it on any of her machines and my XP laptop can't install it.

So I'm kind of still in need of a very good and reliable mail program that plays nicely with Exchange. And a professional office product for the Mac - which I knew doesn't really exist which was one of the reasons why I bought my first one 30 years into the game ;-)

 

I haven't tried it yet because of all this:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5470507