Filed under: Software, Beta Beat
Postbox Beta 8 solves issues, adds QuickLook support
If you're in the market for a new email client to try, I mentioned Postbox a few weeks ago. Late yesterday, the Postbox team released beta 8, which features an improved conversation view, and new and improved support for QuickLook, Flickr, Hotmail, and Growl.
The beta also fixes many bugs found by users (including myself) and performance enhancements. Also, Postbox is heeding user suggestions to become more Mac-like, including keyboard shortcuts in menus, improved notification for unread messages in the dock, and the aforementioned QuickLook and Growl integration. Full release notes are available on the Postbox website.
Performance appears to be about the same -- which is to say pretty good -- and indexing on my 2006-vintage black MacBook still occasionally ramps the fans up to hurricane strength. I've been using Postbox as my primary email client for about three weeks, and its held up to my demanding workflow, but still has a ways to go before it becomes the killer email app.
Still, if you're a high-volume email consumer, Postbox is a solid option for you. Postbox is free (and will continue to be free, so far as we know), universal binary, and requires Mac OS X 10.4 or higher.
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Jash Sayani said 11:26AM on 3-05-2009
PostBox is great! Have been using it for a while with my Hotmail account...
BTW, here's a complete preview of Poxtbox, with all the features and stuff: http://tinyurl.com/aptvlx
Reply
Brady J. Frey said 10:09PM on 3-05-2009
Did you just talk about how cool an app was... but you're using hotmail with it:)? Hotmail's on my list with aol for email users, that's not a compliment.
Hobbes said 11:28AM on 3-05-2009
Wow! Took a peek at their web site and the application looks very impressive. Quite creative and well done. Congratulations to the creators/developers.
I feel tempted to give it a try.
Thanks for the review. Pretty cool.
Reply
Hussain said 11:34AM on 3-05-2009
According to their FAQ, "Postbox is currently in the early BETA stage of development and pricing has not yet been announced." so I don't think it will be free when it's out of beta.
http://postbox-inc.com/faq
Reply
Steven said 12:12PM on 3-05-2009
it's announced to be/remain free:
http://www.techcrunch50.com/2008/conference/presenter.php?presenter=75
(around 00:14:50)
Hobbes said 12:36PM on 3-05-2009
I gave it a try, but it didn't work with my MobileMe account. It kept trying to send an email and would time out. I guess I will wait for newer releases.
I liked what I saw and I will certainly give it another try as it matures further.
Reply
mre said 12:46PM on 3-05-2009
I am really enjoying PostBox.
One issue tho... No syncing with Apple Address Book...
Why is this? I might stop using PostBox if I cannot do this.
Other than that it is great.
Reply
surfwax95 said 1:16PM on 3-05-2009
I'm enjoying using PostBox very, very much.
The lack of Quicklook was the ONLY thing Apple Mail had over it. Now its smooth sailing in PostBox for me.
Reply
airsquid77 said 2:23PM on 3-05-2009
yeah, the whole address book thing is a little wonky. i wish it was bit more tied in.
Reply
oZ said 2:22PM on 3-05-2009
Nice enough, but not quite enough to make me switch. That, and I really dislike XUL apps on OS X.
Reply
TIm said 3:48PM on 3-05-2009
The quicklook thing is pretty neat ..
The program alltogether is really nice and used for a couple weeks now, so far nothing but pleasure ;-)
T
Reply
Jeffrey said 5:28PM on 3-05-2009
I believe its core is based on Mozilla. You will notice several areas similar to Thunderbird such as the address book.
Reply
KiL said 7:54PM on 3-05-2009
Well, the screenshots look impressive, but once you try it you find that it's really just Thunderbird with another theme, less options (is there a way to make it send text only mails now?) and basically all the XUL uglyness you can get.
It's also not integrated at all into OS X (Spotlight, Address Book) which most likely won't change because it's not a proper Cocoa app. It will remain just as alien as Firefox and for a mail app that's just a very bad idea. I'd rather use Mail.app and spruce it up with a bunch of plugins like Mail tag, Mail act-on, Mail.appetizer and widemail (or letterbox).
Reply
solbronumberone said 12:38AM on 4-09-2009
I really liked Postbox but I switched off it because I don't like the mail indexing/search function. It overtaxes my CPU and my hard drive. Back to TBird (happily).
Reply