Which email app: Mozilla or Thunderbird or Apple Mail?

[tomato]

Hiya,

I'm the proud owner of a new 1.5ghz 15'' PB

I'm trying to decide which email app to use from now on for dealing with my 100 mails/day ....

I've used Eudora for the past few years (on a PC which will be quietly retired) and have about 40,000 emails archived in about 50 folders/mailboxes (recently cut down from 100 000 ... ), which I will be transferring to the PB.

What do you reccomend?

My main priority is to use something that's slick, looks good, and has a good interface, can deal with my ton of mail / filters, and is easy to export mailboxes from.

I like the politics of the open source solutions (Mozilla or Thunderbird?), but am unsure of the quality of their interfaces. Have looked at Apple Mail, but I don't know how industrial it is, or how easy it is to get my mailboxes out of it if I want to shift to a different mailer.

Reccomendations would be most welcome

Thanks

Tomato

 

[Logik]

I have used both, but i don't use lots of filters or anything. The built in junk mail filter in thunderbird ROCKS, i had never had a false positive, did occassionally get a few spam that didn't make their way to the junk mail folder, but that's an easy fix. the apple mail.app has decent junk mail filtering but i wasn't real impressed as i get a lot of junk left in my mailbox that isn't filtered automatically. I just use mail.app because it integrates so nicely with addressbook and as such quicksilver and all other launcher apps totally make emailing someone a breeze.

I can't vouch for either in terms of exporting their mailboxes.

My suggestion is use both and decide for yourself. I wouldn't use Mozilla Suite, all new developments are in Thunderbird and the Moz Suite will be replaced in 2.0 with FF and TB.

 

[Westside guy]

I prefer Thunderbird, mainly because I prefer the way it handles multiple e-mail accounts as opposed to Mail.app. I have tried other programs over the years (I've been on multiple platforms - Windows, Linux, and now OS X) and keep coming back to Mozilla's mail apps - largely because they handle IMAP in the way that makes the most sense to me.

I don't like Eudora on the Mac at all.

Mail.app has the address-book integration to recommend it; although that's being worked on for Thunderbird as well (yay!). If I only had one account I'd likely use Mail.app instead of Thunderbird.

 

[bousozoku]

I went from Claris em@iler to Eudora to Thunderbird.

I tried Apple's mail application and found it to be integrated well with Address Book and had a nice look. I find that Thunderbird is better for me and that multi-platform development is a good thing and it gives a viewpoint that single platform applications might never have. Is there something I don't like about Thunderbird? Two things--right now the trash isn't automatically emptied on exit even though it's enabled and the fact that, with another Mozilla application (Firefox) installed, they're both so fat.

 

[atomiton]

I went from Claris em@iler to Eudora to Thunderbird.

I tried Apple's mail application and found it to be integrated well with Address Book and had a nice look. I find that Thunderbird is better for me and that multi-platform development is a good thing and it gives a viewpoint that single platform applications might never have. Is there something I don't like about Thunderbird? Two things--right now the trash isn't automatically emptied on exit even though it's enabled and the fact that, with another Mozilla application (Firefox) installed, they're both so fat.

Does any emailer connect to hotmail as well as outlook express does? I can't imagine it would be THAT difficult a thing to build in.

 

[Logik]

Does any emailer connect to hotmail as well as outlook express does? I can't imagine it would be THAT difficult a thing to build in.

unfortunately no, a simple solution is to use something other than hotmail. i'm sorry but i really honestly do not see why people use hotmail. it's garbage, it gets more spam than i have ever seen in my life and is up and down more than a kid on a pogo stick. if you MUST have a mainstream webmail.. use yahoo and pay for the premium service and get pop3 or imap support.

you won't find any service that supports hotmail as well as outlook because hotmail's api (a bunch of calls to get the mail and such) are not open to anyone but microsoft. as such any effort to do what outlook does is a hack and is for the most part a pain in the arse to do.

trust me.. it's in your best interest to change email providers. i'm sure there are MANY people who will recommend other more worthy email providers if you need any. I personally have my own domain and use that as do the rest of the people in my house and it works great with lots less spam and i can use any email client i choose, i also have webmail setup so in case i do need to check my mail from anywhere, i can.

 

[Doctor Q]

I prefer Thunderbird, mainly because I prefer the way it handles multiple e-mail accounts as opposed to Mail.app.

I use Mail.app for multiple accounts. What does Thunderbird do differently in that regard?

 

[Logik]

I use Mail.app for multiple accounts. What does Thunderbird do differently in that regard?

i use mail.app for 4 email accounts right now, 1 imap (exchange server i believe, total POS), and 3 pop3 accounts (i can do imap but i just prefer to have a local copy instead of storing it online and taking up space on my webserver). it works great my only real complaint though is that i wish i could set up different "accounts" to send from. for example, i have an email alias for 1 of my domains that forwards all mail to one of my other accounts at a different domain (it's used very little so i didn't feel like making an account just for that). but since it's an alias i can't setup a way to send from "That" email address unless there's an account.. i know you can do this in thunderbird though and i do miss that feature.

i think the only really big difference between the way they handle things differently is that thunderbird has all folders relating to 1 account in one location rather than spread out like junk, sent, outbox, inbox, etc... with each account having it's own folder within those... i don't like that so much but i've just gotten used to it.

 

[yippy]

I have not tested this (I don't get enough mail, people don't like me ) but I hear that Mac mail is very good at handeliing large amounts of mail. I would also be willing to bet money it is easyier to get your mail off of it than from Eudora. If you ever switch away in the future.

 

[Westside guy]

I use Mail.app for multiple accounts. What does Thunderbird do differently in that regard?

Pretty much the same as what Logik was saying. I like to have separate folder sets for each e-mail account; especially with multiple IMAP accounts. In Mail.app the inboxes are more or less lumped together (I realize you can look at them separately) while the other IMAP folders are basically sorted without distinction according to account.

One other thing I like is how Thunderbird 0.8 doesn't display external images by default, a la gmail.

 

[bousozoku]

Pretty much the same as what Logik was saying. I like to have separate folder sets for each e-mail account; especially with multiple IMAP accounts. In Mail.app the inboxes are more or less lumped together (I realize you can look at them separately) while the other IMAP folders are basically sorted without distinction according to account.

One other thing I like is how Thunderbird 0.8 doesn't display external images by default, a la gmail.

Thunderbird can organise everything into one set of folders as of version 0.8, though. Choice is good.

 

[PlaceofDis]

is there any way to get thunderbird to check your gmail accounts?

 

[bousozoku]

is there any way to get thunderbird to check your gmail accounts?

Not really, maybe by plug-in, but the idea with gmail accounts is that you need to see the advertising. If google can't control that, you won't see any proper IMAP or POP3 access.

 

[Doctor Q]

Pretty much the same as what Logik was saying. I like to have separate folder sets for each e-mail account; especially with multiple IMAP accounts. In Mail.app the inboxes are more or less lumped together (I realize you can look at them separately) while the other IMAP folders are basically sorted without distinction according to account.

Seems to me Mail.app could arrange incoming messages however you like using rules.

 

[iMeowbot]

Not an option for everyone, but I ended up installing a local copy of UW-imapd so that I could switch among the mail clients until I could make up my mind. 99% of the time I use Mail.app, but there's a copy of Eudora around for the occasional times when HTML mail is needed. Mail.app is set up to do the receiving, and rules in there move everything into the IMAP folders.

I decided not to use something like fetchmail for this because 1) Apple's spam filter does what I need without having to ditz around with procmail etc. and 2) fetchmail is maintained by ESR, ewwww.

 

[tomato]

thanks for the replies

Thanks for so many replies!

Seems there's a lot of happy campers with both thunderbird and mail.app

I've had a play with both and will next week try importing 40 000 messages into both, using Mailbox Cleaner I'll let you know how that went.

They each have their pros and cons.

mail.app is a little bit too cutsey for me - (my mail is not a paper aeroplane!), and some options are a little lacking - e.g. leave on POP server only offers 3 choices (leave for a day, a week or a month) unlike Tbird which offers open ended choices.

But the filter options in mail.app seem a lot richer, offering redirection and classification by group, which Tbird doesn't yet.

Also Tbird needs some fiddling with fonts to get messages to the same readablity as mail.app. It also doesn't offer spellcheck-as-you-write which is important to this bad speller.

I like both but I'm leaning towards mail.app beacuse of the better spellcheck, redirection, and richer filtering options. I don't use IMAP (yet) and I'm happy to throw my various accounts together into the same inbox.

Will definitely keep an eye on thunderbird - if it offered all these options, which it may do in the near future, then I'd move to it.

Regards

- Tomato

Edit: Have found a redirection plug-in for Thunderbird, not sure how mature it is yet.

 

[AmigoMac]

I like both, pretty easy to use, for the important accounts, I use mail, and thunderbird for free-time accounts (ebay, news from sites, those *friends* you don't want to have your personal email) . But if I have to choose, mail gets my vote!.

 

[johnnyjibbs]

I use Mail to check my standard POP3 and Hotmail accounts. I like the simplicity of Mail.app and it works really well for me. For Hotmail to work with Mail, you need to download the hotmail plugin (on versiontracker.com) - it's called HTTPpluggin or something like that. However, I don't think Microsoft likes the program as it tries to break it wherever possible. Now that they are charging PC Outlook Express users to access their Hotmail accounts from within the email program, I don't think they're going to like the idea of Mac users being able to access it for free for much longer...

 

[Logik]

Also Tbird needs some fiddling with fonts to get messages to the same readablity as mail.app. It also doesn't offer spellcheck-as-you-write which is important to this bad speller.

There are a few plugins for spell checking for thunderbird. http://www.mozdev.org has one that i am using. works really well. but i don't have time to look to find what it is (not installed on my pc yet, but works on the mac)

 

[Westside guy]

Seems to me Mail.app could arrange incoming messages however you like using rules.

True, but I wasn't talking about message organization - I was talking about how the folders themselves are organized. Unless of course I created a whole slew of folders and named them "account1-receipts", "account2-friends", "account1-savedmail" etc. which would be rather kludgy.

It just comes down to personal preference, of course. To me, Mail.app feels like a single-account program that's had multiple account support sort of haphazardly tacked on. Just like Eudora feels (again, to me anyway) like a POP3 e-mail program that has IMAP support tacked on by people who don't really grok the concept of IMAP.

 

[coconn06]

I have not tested this (I don't get enough mail, people don't like me ) but I hear that Mac mail is very good at handeliing large amounts of mail.QUOTE]

I haven't used Apple's Mail program in a couple years, so things may have changed, but I switched to MS Entourage because Mail choked on large email databases (I have at least a couple thousand emails; I like to be able to store all my past emails). For all I know, Mail may have overcome this problem.

I'll give the nod to MS Entourage (I know that wasn't one of your options, but it should be!) as a great all-in-one email, calendar, to-do list program. I've been using it for at least two years and never had any programs. And it's pretty fast even on my old iBook.

And I usually hate Microsoft!

 

[Doctor Q]

Cross reference to a related thread:

If any of you know the answer to my Mail.app problem, please post there.

 

[nbs2]

don't ask where

Does any emailer connect to hotmail as well as outlook express does? I can't imagine it would be THAT difficult a thing to build in.

I downloaded a plugin for my hotmail account and my gmail account. I can't remember where I got the hotmail plug-in, but i think it's called httpmail. The gmail was put together in an easy to use method on another thread. The hotmail works great, while the gmail only has an issue with remembering my password (it's in the keychain but still asks for it, if anybody has a solution). Oh, I currently use mail.app, mostly out of inertia. it's such a pain to change utilities sometime.

Oh. the reason some people use hotmail is to give an address to people that you don't care if you hear from in 3 months but have to deal with for the time being. i started using hotmail b/c it was free and i have been using it since before it was bought out by microsoft.