Mail.app replacement

For me Thunderbird has two big advantages. The Mail files are compatible with standard UNIX Mail app conventions. AND, it runs on multiple platforms. Having the same client app and user interface whether I am using Linux, Windows, Mac OS X or Solaris (I use all of these) is a big big plus. The fact that it is a great application, and has lots of support is a plus as well. I used Eudora for years, and liked most of it. However, the inability to thread discussions 'properly' was a killer for me. Once I switched to Thunderbird (about 3+ years ago) I didn't go back. By the way, to the guy who said you can't have all of your email in one mailbox, you are wrong. Go to each of the account settings and click on the Advanced button for Server. There you can specify which mailbox you want the mail to be delivered into. Makes Thunderbird much easier to use with several user accounts. Of course, some people prefer not to do it that way. Just remember to manually move all of the email from your 'secondary' accounts to the primary Inbox before you do this, as it is hard to get back to those mailboxes after you have made the change.

My big peeve with Thunderbird with my imap server (dovecot) is that Thunderbird refuses to keep valid folder counts for new mails -- it does for perhaps 3-4 folders and the rest never update even though new mail is in the folder. I've tried using the folder subscribe feature and no change.. It's been there for several versions.. Perhaps this is something related to Dovecot that a switch to some other imap server might solve. Too bad we can't get our hands on the source to Mulberry and update the UI to bring it into the 21'st century since it's got great support for imap..

#47 "Just tried to unpack it and there is an error in Stuffit that says it contains a bad file. Even donloaded it from multiple sources." I just downloaded it yesterday and it works fine. Installed it and everything. Problem seems to be on your end.

Eudora. Bulletproof. Used Eudora for 12 years - no lost email. Very flexible filters Customize toolbar to ANY menu item. Can save searches which then work like Smart folders. OS X Addressbook integration (read-only). Many keyboard shortcuts. Account-specific settings. Settings to control almost anything. Stationery (templates). Scripting via AppleScript. Customize fonts, buttons, etc. Can't imagine trusting my email to anything else.

I don't have a direct link to any reviews but the guy at www.daringfireball.com has done many reviews on mail apps. I think his favorite is Mailsmith or something.

I second the post on PowerMail, that I have been using for years now. It is one of the very few alternatives to Mail that will interface with Spotlight, and it has ties with what I consider just the best spam filter in town, the bayesian SpamSieve. Not only do I daily handle hundreds of mails (with a 99,0% spam filtering efficiency with SpamSieve) but its database access is so fast I still maintain some 5 years of mail right in the database. (I do regular backups, but PM never crashed a database). Moreover you can set things up in extremely great detail would you need it: for instance, you can decide you'll download only the first 5K of all mail in a first pass, which will be sufficient to filter out spams, then reconnect deleting *only* the spams right on the server (without having downloaded them entirely). On the bad side for some, Powermail doesn't allow you to prepare html emails (it still can show the ones received mainly thanks to Apple's html hooks). What is a bit funny with your post, is that while PM have been way ahead from Mail for years, I slowly was starting to consider there just was no future for paying email applications, with all these GNUmail appearing and Mail.app becoming better and better. My position was almost that in the mail world, the future now would belong to those who would develop new plugins for Mail.app rather than full, paying alternatives. Would I be wrong...

Eudora is a flexible e-mail program with a simple interface. I started using it back in 1990 and despite attempts using other programs, I have always returned to Eudora. For five years I edited a scientific journal using Eudora mailboxes to handle the transaction database. I used it until we replaced our manuscript handling system with one with a browser interface.

there's a Mail.app clone called "GNUMail". This seems pretty functional and looks similar to Mail.app (thanks to Cocoa). It's free.

I use mail.app all the time now - I had problems with IMAP when I first started using it, but smart folders came to the rescue - have a look at my blog entry for details on how I did it: http://www.bjw.me.uk/2005/12/mailapp-and-imap.html

To Peter Reail: Mail marks the email as deleted on the server but it still has to be "purged" from the server. Check the settings for mail.app under the IMAP account and ensure that Delete Mail on Quit is selected, or something to that effect. Hope it helps.