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Sun, 25 Aug 2002
Usability of Mail.app in 10.2
Jaguar's Mail is one of the cleanest mail clients I've ever seen and has some great new features. I'm now attempting to use it as my standard mail client. Here are some of my tips & observations, plus a way to use it with Eudora for mail archiving.
Using Eudora Mailbox Cleaner, it's very easy to import mailboxes & filters from Eudora. Mail.app also has built-in importers for many other email clients.
The first thing I noticed is that Mail.app is extremely slow when dealing with mailboxes containing many messages. My archive of the carbon development & open transport lists from this year is over 6000 messages, and it took mail.app about 15 seconds to display the message list on my G4/500. It took several minutes to index all of the messages in that folder.
Almost every popular email client, including Eudora, Entourage, and PowerMail, provides a very easy way to create a filter or rule based on the currently selected message. In Mail.app, you have to open the preferences window, and it doesn't automatically fill in any fields from the selected message. If you have your mail filtered to different mailboxes, the new message indicator in the dock will only show messages left in the inbox, if any. Furthermore, if you're using IMAP, any messages filtered into a different folder will be removed from the server immediately.
Mail.app is very nicely integrated with iChat & Jaguar's address book. If a contact is in your addressbook and has an AIM address, you'll see that person's online status.
There doesn't seem to be any easy way to export from Mail.app to another email client. Although Mail.app supposedly uses the same standard MBOX format that Eudora uses, Eudora won't recognize Mail's mailboxes.
I eventually came up with a good strategy for using Mail.app as my standard mail client. I've set up my accounts as IMAP when possible, so I can access my mail from either my G4 or my iBook. I have my filters only change color, flag messages, and play different alert sounds rather than moving mail to different folders to avoid having them deleted from the server (If I filter them to folders on the server, other email applications using POP3 won't download those messages). When my mailboxes get too big, I run Eudora to download all of my mail and delete it from the server, and I continue to use Eudora to archive my email.