So here’s the knock-down bout between Thunderbird and Mail.app. When I switched, I tried to give every native application a fair trial (though I knew there was no way Safari would be able to match the functionality of my ridiculously plugin laden Firefox setup) over what I was used to. The mail client of choice was a hard fought battle that went back and forth more than once. In the end, it came down to which application bugged me the least. Here’s what I hate about each application.
Thunderbird:
- Non-native address book — The integration between all the built-in apps is amazingly nice in OS X. I even tried a bleeding edge 3.0 line of Thunderbird with a patch to “integrate” the addressbook, but it was a poor substitute and didn’t come close to the features Mail.app has (automatic adding to address book from email address, full name recognition, cute little buddy photo icon placement)
- Connection stability — Thunderbird did not like me suspending/resuming the laptop. It didn’t have the integration with the OS to detect that the network connection had gone away and the ability to reconnect once it was back on-line. This and the poor ability to recover from an interrupted IMAP4 session forcing me to fully re-download multi-gig folders was the final straw that did it.
- Start to compose a message, forget about it, and try to quit thunderbird. Watch tbird hang and cause system instability. Nice. (Mail.app, in contrast, just automatically saves the half-composed message as a draft, as it should)
Mail.app
- Hotkey remapping — You can remap some of the hotkeys in mail.app via the system hotkey settings, but it’s not nearly as flexible as thunderbird with keyconfig. This combined with the poor default choices for hotkeys annoys me. So many of my more common actions were all three-button keystrokes instead of two. When you’re fighting off RSI, every little motion saving helps.
- IMAP subscribe — You can’t select which folders to show and which not to show in Mail.app for a particular server. You could make dozens of “smart” folders in a separate hierarchy to mimic the original structure and hide the full mail server, but that seems like a particularly “dumb” solution.
- IMAP idle — Notice a trend? Mail.app could use some protocol support improvements. Here’s hoping Leopard will bring them. IMAP IDLE is basically push email and it’s super-nice. Not necessary, really, but annoying to not have it when it’s been a standard for many years now. Of course, there is a plugin to solve the problem, but Mail.app isn’t as flexible as Thunderbird is in terms of plugins and I’m always a bit skeptical. This one however appears to have been working well after some of the updates, but it really ought to be integrated.
- Searching — For all the extra effort put into fast indexed searching in mail.app and with spotlight, it’s really frustrating to not be able to search with simple search operators (from:bob arrived after march 1, 2001, with an attachment for example). One possible work-around is to install the google desktop plugin. However creating another index file didn’t seem like a good option for me. Plus, in the original version I tried, it wasn’t behaving as it should with my filevault encrypted home directory (it’s supposed to save the index file for the home directory inside of the home directory so it’s encrypted as well like spotlight does instead of the system-wide index location). While we’re on the topic of searching, how about being able to search mail-headers. The “everything” search field doesn’t actually search everything. I’d rather have thunderbird’s unindexed searching since it at least lets me search for exactly what I want, even if it’s a tad slower. Also on the topic of searching, while I really appreciate the extra metadata added from address book integration, you can’t search it. So if bjones@email.com is in my address book, the name Bob Jones will show up in the from field, but searching for mail “from” Bob Jones won’t find that email. It’s annoying to remember this /after/ I’ve searched for email from someone and couldn’t figure out why it was missing.
- Quick-filing — mail act-on is a great plugin for Mail.app and almost makes up for not having Nostalgy. Still, I have too many folders to use a single keystroke as the primary filer for each folder.
Of course, despite the laundry list of things with Mail.app, the settings being lost in Thunderbird each time a connection died out and the inability to handle suspend/resume means that I’ve spent the last month or two of my OS X life almost entirely in Mail.app. We’ll see, maybe real native OS X integration for thunderbird gets stable, or Correo gets feature parity with my tweaked Thunderbird (unlikely unless they support extensions). Until then, Mail.app it is.