Top 8 reasons Mail.app sucks

Someone was complaining about the lock file they couldn't find that caused mail to crash. I finally found it (them, actually there are two), and there in the fricking address book. Why the addressbook should stop mail from starting up is beyond me, but for future victims of this problem, who previoulsy would fruitlessly search the web for answers, here are the files:

/Users/name/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/.database.lockN
and

/Users/name/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/.skIndex.ABPerson.lockN

Bloody hell, what a pain.

In Panther I dumped Mail for Entourage. In Tiger I went back to Mail for one reason and one reason only: Smart Folders. I have gotten used to them and I'm stuck. I'm certain the next Entourage will have Smart Folders too and thats when I will switch back.

The problem for me is not mail per se, it's address book, which falls short of Entourage for data-management features, and for some reason Apple designed Mail to talk only to Address Book and not any other address book, so I'm stuck in Entourage

I have to agree, I am rather fond of Apple's Mail client myself. I was an Outlook user for about 5 years when I switched to Mac a year ago. I work in IT support so I have to use many different email clients to support our user base. I prefer Mail over Thunderbird, Eudora, Entourage, Outlook, Lotus, and Mozilla Mail. I currently use Mail in an IMAP environment on a laptop as well. I've certainly not had any speed issues on my iBook with Mail.

Agreeing with 11, i use Mail on a daily basis, never close it except after a update that requires a restart. I recieve 100's and 1000's of messages a day and mail handles them perfectly. I also use about 40 smart folders that update on the fly, thats how i get around my mail so easy. Great, simple app, does all a mail app needs to do, recieve, read, keep or delete and reply. People want things like different acounts for different locations? set all acounts up, you can click the indivdual ones you want to see mail from, like i do for several acounts. Entourage in my opinion is like most MS apps, to much to it, i used to use thunderbird but was a CPU hog but i did like it, may be fixed now. Mail uses around 4 - 10% when being used in the foreground.

Liam

Dudes.

I totally don't know what y'all are talking about, but I must be the voice of dissent.

That's right, I like Mail.

Entourage is thick. Thick as in, too many fargin' UI elements, tabs, message panes on the left, icons, bars, etc. ad infinitum. MOFO BUSY!!!

Mail is quick for me; sorry to hear yer troubles, all. It's fast (thousands of msgs.), quick, easy, intuitive; and I LOVE THE LEFT PANE IN TIGER. What's with the "I'm teh l33t email pow3r uz3r tude with scripting and crap... it's fargin MAIL!!! sheesh. delete, file, reply. ain't harder than that; hasn't been since the bbs days. Yeah, I was there.

Sizz-to-the-orry, but Mail trumps Entourage. Fer me.

mmkay.

I find mail.app necessary for one thing only: Scripting mail actions. I have a folder on my desktop that I can drag files into and it will immediately email them to a predetermined address. But I don't use mail for much else, it's a crippled app.

They forgot "folders locked to the left" now. That royally stinks. Every version prior to the Tiger version allowed the user to have folders on the right, which I prefer.

Hmm... I use Mail to access two different accounts via IMAP all the time, and I've never had any trouble. Both mailboxes have well over 5000 messages, too.

Re: #3 above -- sounds like the problem is with the program that you used to create the attached file, not with Mail. Probably has to do with character encoding used on the Mac vs. on the windows machine.

Mail doesn't really seem to have problems with large mailboxes. What it does seem to have problems with is when a large mailbox suddenly appears. For example, if you have a mailbox that has 8,000 messages in it, which you've accumulated over time, no problem. However, if you take a vacation and come back to find that your spam mailbox now has 8,000 NEW messages, not so good. Usually when this happens I give up on mail, delete the mail in another client, and depending on how bad it messed mail up, delete all it's preferences and start clean.

Of course I got tired of doing that (and also the fact that if the network goes away, mail complains about locked mailboxes and refuses to start and I can't find a lock file ANYWHERE, causing me to have to delete the enveloped index file which half the time fixes it, the other half the time I end up having to delete the entire preferences folder).

Whew.

Other than those things, uh, mail is great.