Apple still doesn't really get email

I am learning to HATE Mac mail:

1) Whenever I receive an email with several people copied in and hit "Reply All" my .mac email can't figure out who those people are and insists I edit the CC field. So, I go on an annoying and time consuming hunt for the offending address, even though every other email program on the planet has the ability to understand a line of addresses. I try deleting this or adding that until Finally! It was that damn comma betwen my sister's first and last name! So, I've created "clean" email lists that I keep posted on my notes so that I can cut and paste them into the cc field.

2) When I send an email, it may never arrive, unless I notice that it has landed in my "Drafts" folder instead of being sent to the intended recipient. This happens with EVERY 10th or 15th email. But then, maybe it DID get sent, or maybe not. Maybe it kept a copy in drafts and sent it on anyway. Should I resend my business letter to my clients in India and risk seeming like a dope, or take a chance that they received it. What a fun game!

3) Everything's working just fine sending and receiving email from home when one day my ISP server just decides to reject my .mac email account and no matter what I do I can no longer send and receive email. So, I resort back to my old AOL account, which works just fine and has for over a decade). I check the .mac forums and it turns out there are a ton of people who's .mac account is suddenly rejected by their ISP and they're all running around trying to fix the problem. "It's not .mac, it must be your ISP!" Why do we have to go through that? My ISP never rejected my AOL nor emails from my own mail system on my website. I expect more from Apple. I now only use the web version of .mac mail, because the version that comes on the Mac no longer works from home.

4) Many people have complained that their emails are returned by my .mac account and all are very good about later forwarding me the rejection notice. So, even if it's sent, maybe it never arrived. This happens at home and at the office. Which brings me to number....

5) I have started bcc-ing myself into my emails to make sure they went somewhere and to see when they get there. Most arrive in a timely way, but every so often one arrives DAYS later, which can be embarrasing at times. I figure it's been stored in a super secret invisible drafts folder for laughs.

6) The little things: It's hard to add addresses. When you want to drag an email into a folder that's below the folder window it won't scroll down to it. You can't search all of the folders at once for a lost email (at least I can't figure it out).

I'm a fanatic about email and have at least 20 years of it saved away. I also have my undergraduate college notebooks salted away in a nice box. All one has to do with paper records is fail to throw them away and presto, an archive with many uses. Why haven't we gotten there yet with computer files and email?

I consider Mail to be the best email program I have used for daily usability and getting things done, but there are some really big remaining nuissances, the biggest of which is a huge problem for someone who regards information as more than chatter:

* Archiving Mail data used to be a simple matter of moving the mailboxes off to another disk area where they could be saved and later moved back to be again managed by Mail.app. Even better, an archived old mailbox could be dropped on the application and opened into a new viewer window no matter where the mailbox was stored. Talk about easy review of old emails! That was great, but was too good to last.

And that was before Spotlight came along and the entire mailbox format was changed. Now Mail no longer recognizes its own mailboxes from earlier versions and has to import them, even if they are moved into the ~/Library/Mail folder. This really stinks.

In addition there are serious glitches if one has the temerity to rename mailboxes inside Mail, involving the apparent loss of all of ones email. I have gotten into so much trouble doing this that it is ridiculous.

As someone said, we have to hope for far better from the new version of Mail about to appear.

I work for a large (10000+ employee) company that uses Mail.app extensively. For both IMAP and POP, Mail.app.works great for us. Is there really a better alternative available for Mac OS X?

For the price Apple charges for .Mac, it would be nice if the webmail could be a little bit more feature-rich.
Also, when I use it with Firefox 2 on my PC at work, I sometimes get very strange bugs -- for example, I can't read a message by double-clicking it anymore -- the webmail opens the message window but there's nothing in it, or it says "Unexpected message format."
The only solution then is to restart Firefox, but even that doesn't work sometimes, so I just launch IE7...

Mail works just fine for me, but I get tired of people finding things to complain about. If Apple makes a really great App that was already on the market, then people complain the developer is being squeased out. If Apple realeases a good App that doesn't take over the market, then people complain about how much it sucks. As I said, Mail works for me. If I or someone else needs more features, then buy another program and stop complaining about something extra that Apple is providing.

I use mail.app exclusively on my macbook. It does everything I need it to and work s like a charm. I receive tons of e-mail daily, much of it spam which it dutifully filters into the Junk mail folder. I can't recall it ever crashing on me and I almost never quit the app, it's always running in the background, picking up my mail whenever I get a wireless signal.

I understand that some people have problems, but that may be indicative of some other problem lurking in the background and not mail.app.

JLL... I was just coming back to say that I discovered the new Lists icon in Mail's toolbar in the latest Leopard build... Maybe it was there previously and I didn't notice. What a relief! You can now format bullet or numbered lists in Mail, which was my last remaining peeve. Leopard Mail truly rocks!

All I really want is to be able to get my e-mail from an Exchange 2003 server using RPC over HTTPS.

"Why can't Apple understand that people want to use bullets in their text, or numbered lists, for heavens sake."

You said that you've tried Mail in Leopard. Look at little closer ;-)

Anyway, the article is about .Mac webmail and you're all talking about Mail.app.