What Mac Mail solution do you use?

I use MailSmith with Spamsieve but use Mail.app for some foreign language email (Japanese and Chinese). Unfortunantly since I upgraded to Tiger Mail.app has never worked, it crashes when I hit "Check Mail"

i'm am a new switcher so i'm very much sitting on the fence...I use Mail (a program that I am liking for its simplicity, but having probs understanding how to create smart folder). I also use Entourage to link all of my various student, work and personal accounts together. I really love entourage for its project management features. Finally, I use thunderbird for school and newsgroup postings. All are great, but I can't decide which I like best...... uncommitted to date.

For some strange reason. Microsoft products are good when they aren't on Windows. I had a VERY difficult time getting Gmail POP set up in Outlook XP; Entourage 2004 did it fine. Virtual PC runs Knoppix and Damn Small Linux faster than Windows XP Pro.

Entourage 2004. I definately like the integration of tasks, calendar and e-mail. I use Project Center for grouping related stuff (tasks, mail, contacts, files, notes etc). I also use Exchange at work so I appreciate the (at least minimal) support. I am still on Panther, so I haven't tried the latest Apple Mail.

Just to clarify - I'm not suggesting using it - now - in the Classic environment. I'm just saying - what was so much better about Eudora? Is Mail really that much better now?

Okay - I'm not just saying asking this to be controversial. It's a genuine question.... Why does everyone hate Outlook Express? As an embarrassingly late switcher from 9 to X, I've used OE 5 for years. I've 8 email accounts - it goes in and picks mail up from them at different frequencies depending on how busy the account, it files them in different boxes according to the rules I've specified, it's never crashed/let me down.... What am I missing?

Mail.app all the way. It's simple, clean and to the point.

Thunderbird, all the way. (And it works fine with Gmail if you set it up properly.)

I've tried using Mail.app, but become frustrated with its quirks every time, and go back to Entourage 2004. Mail has very limited support for notification of new mail in IMAP folders other than the account's Inbox (though, to be fair, so do most clients), there are no Next/Previous Message toolbar buttons in the Message windows that appear when you double-click on a message, and, most annoying, if it has the least bit of trouble with an IMAP mailbox, it freaks out and asks you for the password for it 20000 times a day. Entourage *never* does that. To make matters worse, Mail.app in Tiger is hideously ugly. I truly hope Apple writes this off as a design experiment gone wrong. For that matter, I truly hope they finally settle on some attractive version of "this is what OS X programs should look like." They're getting worse than Windows developers in that regard these days. Back to the topic at hand. None of this is to say that Entourage doesn't have its quirks, because it certainly does. It's horribly slow at opening IMAP mailboxes. Even if you've done everything you can to tell it to cache full message bodies at each check interval, it still seems to read all the message headers every time you click on a mailbox, which takes an annoyingly long time. Truth be told, I've never yet met the email client, Macintosh or Windows, that didn't do a few things that annoyed the hell out of me. But, on the whole, Entourage seems to be the *least* annoying for me.

I use Mail.app under Tiger and have just persuaded my wife over from Eudora. It just works!