A few days ago I noticed I could get iCal to email me reminders about birthdays and such. I activated it, and found out it only supports Mail application. Oh well, I configured it, found out it was almost like thunderbird, and decided to give it a go.

I work with 5 mailboxes, all IMAP, and I have 30 filters to move 95% of the incoming emails to the folders they belong to (one for each customer, mailing list and whatever else). The list of those rules and folders live constantly because customers come and go. You can imagine the pain I’m currently going through because I can’t simply hit the ‘n’ button to go to the next unread message like I’m used to.

There are several other problems, but that alone was enough to make me want to forget all about the software. It’s easy to do, so I don’t see a reason why Apple couldn’t steal that feature from Thunderbird, they’ve already taken so many others. Now I’m just forced to quit Mail 2-3 times a day when it pops up to send the reminders and then decided to stay there, eating up CPU and memory – for nothing :P

@core – I _have_ to comment on a few of your points. I doubt you’ll ever read them, but maybe someone else does. First, is having to click the unread column, read the messages and then click again to sort by date or whatever you prefer to sort by many, many times a day something you like doing when the option would be just to hit a button to immediately jump to the next available unread message? How about multiplying that by the amount of mailboxes and folders you have? Sure, if you read emails only once a day every second day you can do that standing on your head, but if you work in this century and preferably somewhere else than as a cashier at McDonalds you probably spend a lot more time with your emails. For me wasting a few hours of my time sorting the view every 5 minutes is not an option. Using smart folders is a slightly better idea, but even that falls so far behind the Thunderbird approach that I wouldn’t even consider it seriously.

What comes to using IMAP, do you really, REALLY see a good alternative around? I’ve got MB Air, Macbook, a windows laptop, 3 windows desktops, a Nokia N810, my mobile phone, an USB stick with PortableThunderbird and my webmail I use whenever I don’t have any of the devices mentioned before with me. Being able to access exactly the same mailbox regardless of the place or the device required is something I wouldn’t dream of living without. Downloading the same messages to every single one of those machines would be a huge waste of bandwidth. Maybe POP3 is a valid option for normal home users in the U.S. where you get charged sick amounts of money for tiny mailboxes. For us in the real world it feels something out of the 1980′s. Yes, I know I’ve got a few more devices I use constantly than many normal people, but that comes with my work. It still doesn’t make a licking difference if you have 2 or 20 devices – when you use more than one, only a fool would prefer different views to the same information if you could easily get the same thing, always, everywhere. Not to mention what’d happen when your computer decided to die one day. I just fire up the next one and don’t miss a single email.

When a send using the default server fails, a dialog comes up asking what other server you’d like to use.

I agree that hooking it up with network locations is even better, most of the time this setting works for me

Wish Apple would fix it.

One additional thing I personally hate is that it is not possible to construct a smart mailbox using criteria such as “Message is encrypted” or “Message is signed”. Funny enough, you can make a rule using these criteria, but rules always have a message changing behaviour (i.e. you can only move/delete/color/bounce/… a message) and I want the encrypted messages to stay unchanged in their original folder and just aggregated in a smart mailbox. I do not want my encrypted messages to be indexed, so searching for their content does not work (which is just fine or, indeed, the whole point of not indexing it) and I want to have a smart mailbox that includes only encrypted messages so I can sort of manually find the message I need (possibly using a normal search using the subject of the message which is never encrypted). And of course, for some reason unknown to me, you cannot make use of the fact that signed/encrypted messages contain attachments with name smime.p7m — constructing a rule to filter messages on such an attachment name simply doesn’t return any results, probably because Mail.app is too `smart’ too consider these not true attachments. Heck, you can’t even create a smart mailbox using arbitrary message headers such as Content-Type which would help in this case. I’ve submitted this as a bug report to Apple about 9 months ago (along with the IMAP subscription and several other things), but still no change in the most recent version…

http://www.david-reitter.com/software/osxpostfix.html

That way you can send mail on the move and indeed from anywhere by sending via localhost.