TUAW First Look: Postbox Public Beta

This is a nice app, but at the moment it's lacking a few too many things for it to replace Mail.app for me.

- Keyboard shortcuts. I can't count the number of times I tried to send an e-mail with command+shift+d in Postbox, some other main shortcuts were also missing (switching from Reply to Reply All while composing a message was another one)

- It would be nice to assign a mailbox/folder to a tab so that whenever I select that mailbox from the navigation pane, it actually switches to that tab instead of keeping me in the same tab (I'm probably alone in my tab usage).

- Horizontal layout! The vertical layout with messages above content creates huge wastes of space on larger wide screen monitors. I don't need the entire width of my screen to display From/Subject/Date/etc.

- Threaded conversations are pretty nice - I enjoy being able to click on the overall thread and get the compacted summarization, though it would be nice to see my replies as well. Sometimes I lose track of where I am in longer thread with the summary.

-MailTags/Act-On like functionality would be HUGE, and it's one of the reasons I'll be staying with Mail.app for the time being. I have several automated tasks through MailTags and Act-On that archive, color, flag, etc. messages as the come in or as I initiate certain keystrokes.

I'll definitely continue to watch its progress, but until it gets deeper OS X integration (as had already been pointed out) and loses more of the Thunderbird look/feel I'll be continuing to use Mail.app.

I really like this app .. thanks for pointing me to it.

I have neither a problem with the looks (I actually think it looks pretty neat) and I have the mailserver collecting all my different mail accounts as well as doing the Spam filtering.
I haven't had any problems setting it up nor running it for the day .. pretty cool app I would say.

T.

Quickest Gmail IMAP setup I've ever done, so a great first impression.

However the settings page looks identical to Firefox's but unlike Firefox's proxy settings, just don't function for me at work. Plus they couldn't even make the items in the toolbar resize/relocate properly, if you drag the main window smaller horizontally items dissappear from the toolbar without the Mac-standard arrows to show that some items are hidden. Compare it to Apple Mail and you'll see what I mean. Tabbed mail is cool but the fake cocoa interface really puts me off. The main window looks OK but the prefs window is fugly.

All in all, yeah, it's not that bad. A really good effort actually and it seems like they're stabbing at some vaguely cool stuff, but really, what more could you actually want in a mail client that Apple Mail doesn't provide?

There are some great things about this program (annotations, the buttons that show all attachments/URLs).... but it feels incredibly un-Mac. I can see how they tried a bit to make it look more Mac-like, but you just can't cover up the mozillaness.

It's like putting foundation on a goiter.

So I'm trashing it for now, but I will check back now and then to see how it is developing.

Is it my connection, or has the postbox-inc.com site been down for a while? I'd love to try this while I change over a bunch of accounts to IMAP for my business... just can't seem to get anything other than Page Load Error. Thanks.

@Sean Sloane said 4:53AM on 2-11-2009
"In the beta I had downloaded I saw no way to select another language for spellchecking. I am not talking about localisation but spellchecking.
"

main problem with all Mozilla stuff (firefox, thunderbird and so postbox) is they don"t use Cocoa widgets.

so, they fake the checkspelling stuff like a real cocoa application and use their OWN spellers.

and yeah.. they didn't add the multilingual features of Cocoa.

I wanted to like this, I really did. I removed it after about 3 hours of use. After setting up my @me and @gmail accounts and importing and indexing all my mail (which seemed to go great) this thing just continued to hang on nearly every action. Switching from one mailbox to another in a tab took nearly 10 seconds, constant freezing. Highly annoying. The entire app seems buggy as hell. Oh well. Back to mail.app and gmail.com I go.

When I resize the window, my MBP just hangs.

Unified mailbox? I just made a smart mailbox for that (in Apple Mail).

I tried to use this. I really did. But in order to give up Mail app to do certain thing. It has to import not just my mailboxes but my multiple accounts, all my rules, intergrate full with the address book (or at least copy my contacts into an editable format) and intergrate with SpamSieve. All this seemed to do was import my mailboxes in folders. And then it crashed when I tried to open one of the folders. Or I should say it froze. The little stopwatch has been spinning for the past several minutes now. The folder I am trying to view contains 159 e-mails. After reading about it I was really hoping it would be a good alternative to Mail but so far I just can't use it for anything meaningful. It does seem to have some potential though and I will be keeping any eye on it.