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What mail clients do you use?

S

skinniezinho

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jan 1, 2009
1,111
99
Portugal
Hi guys,I'd like to know wich mail clients do you use?
Today I was running activity monitor (leopard) and saw that mail.app uses 16-20% cpu without doing nothing..I guess it is a lot for an app like this.
I don't need great features,just simple and light mail client compatible with gmail and that allows me to use imap accounts, any suggestion?

In 10.4 I used latest Thunderbird from here:http://www.rpm-mozilla.org.uk/
But it doesn't seem that light too..
Should I try the older versions or there is anything better?
 
Wirelessly posted (iPhone 4s: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9B179 Safari/7534.48.3)

Uses little to nothing on lion tbh
 
I use alpine. No, I'm not joking. It's ridiculously lightweight by today's standards, using only about 12MB of RAM and almost no CPU time. Plus, it's always at my fingertips thanks to Visor/Total Terminal/iTerm2.
 
I currently use Thunderbird on my PowerBook; I've also noticed that is does use a lot of CPU. Have been looking for something lighter.

SuperJudge said:
I use alpine. No, I'm not joking. It's ridiculously lightweight by today's standards, using only about 12MB of RAM and almost no CPU time. Plus, it's always at my fingertips thanks to Visor/Total Terminal/iTerm2.
Click to expand...

I'll take a look at that - thanks.
 
SuperJudge said:
I use alpine. No, I'm not joking. It's ridiculously lightweight by today's standards, using only about 12MB of RAM and almost no CPU time. Plus, it's always at my fingertips thanks to Visor/Total Terminal/iTerm2.
Click to expand...


I guess that is too hardcore for me :p
But thanks for sharing =)
 
skinniezinho said:
I guess that is too hardcore for me :p
But thanks for sharing =)
Click to expand...

I realize it's not for everyone, but it's definitely something to be aware of. :)

A lack of horsepower on my G5 tower pointed me toward a lot of command line tools that I didn't previously know existed. It's possible to do just about everything from the CLI except for browsing websites with images and Javascript.

For everyone serious about PPC hardware, I definitely recommend having a look at using the command line more. It can definitely stretch your machine's abilities a long way.
 
SuperJudge said:
I realize it's not for everyone, but it's definitely something to be aware of. :)

A lack of horsepower on my G5 tower pointed me toward a lot of command line tools that I didn't previously know existed. It's possible to do just about everything from the CLI except for browsing websites with images and Javascript.

For everyone serious about PPC hardware, I definitely recommend having a look at using the command line more. It can definitely stretch your machine's abilities a long way.
Click to expand...

That true, I just wish there was something like this extension
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bjekedpipaedojkbialnhabcecmfpofh

for any powerpc compatible browser, sometimes it would make my life so easier!
 
Entourage 2008.

My main experiences with Macs has always been in a business environment where some form of standalone email app was used (Outlook Express, Entourage X, etc). So, when I got my own Macs that's the direction I went in. The last experience I had with Apple mail was in Jaguar and Panther. Compared to Entourage X, which I was using at the time, I was not impressed.

Entourage supports IMAP of course. All of my webmail accounts (Yahoo, Gmail, etc) are set up in Entourage and I use it for all of my accounts.
 
I'm using Thunderbird, I used it on Windows before and it's still okay (albeit not updated anymore on PPC, I think). Never had any resource problems with it and really, what G5 could choke on a mailing app? What's the point of only using <20MB of RAM when you have like 2GB?
 
thorns said:
and really, what G5 could choke on a mailing app? What's the point of only using <20MB of RAM when you have like 2GB?
Click to expand...

It was actually CPU spiking and memory leak issues related to Gecko in Thunderbird that I had that caused me go whole hog for pine/alpine. This was back in 2007 or so, so probably some dot iteration of 1.5. I didn't much care for Mail prior to Snow Leopard so I decided that I just wanted a minimal experience for email since it's just words. I don't need anything fancy with regard to email, so why waste resources when it's not necessary?
 
skinniezinho said:
Hi guys,I'd like to know wich mail clients do you use?
Today I was running activity monitor (leopard) and saw that mail.app uses 16-20% cpu without doing nothing..I guess it is a lot for an app like this.
I don't need great features,just simple and light mail client compatible with gmail and that allows me to use imap accounts, any suggestion?

In 10.4 I used latest Thunderbird from here:http://www.rpm-mozilla.org.uk/
But it doesn't seem that light too..
Should I try the older versions or there is anything better?
Click to expand...

Any chance your Mail was downloading messages from the server? I've got a couple thousand and it usually takes a little while to get them all on a fresh install of Leopard. Your case sounds abnormal, none of my PPCs do that.
 
vohdoun said:
Strange. It uses 0.0 on my G5 which is running 24/7. Though I see you're on a G4.
Click to expand...

burnout8488 said:
Any chance your Mail was downloading messages from the server? I've got a couple thousand and it usually takes a little while to get them all on a fresh install of Leopard. Your case sounds abnormal, none of my PPCs do that.
Click to expand...

It downloaded the messages before I saw, but I took a look now and it says 0.0..
 
I am using Thunderbird on a G5 Quad with Tiger. The machine idles, with Thunderbird running in the background, at about 1% at most. Actually, I am using a custom G5 build of Thunderbird - Lanikai. I am presently running version 3.1.13 of Lanikai, which I understand corresponds to the current version of Thunderbird.

I am entering this post via TenFourFox, a custom G5 build of Firefox. Custom G5 builds of just about anything are great where they exist. I strongly encourage them.
 
mac57 said:
Actually, I am using a custom G5 build of Thunderbird - Lanikai. I am presently running version 3.1.13 of Lanikai, which I understand corresponds to the current version of Thunderbird.
Click to expand...

Are you sure? I'm not having much success finding the developers site. I keep seeing posts going as far back as 2011/10. It's easy to find TenFourFox.
 
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