• Organizing. I’m a folders/labels kinda guy. Doing that in Mail is less than intuitive and takes too many steps. Bonus is there aren’t any keyboard shortcuts for making new mailboxes, and it’s a chore to get to filters. This should be easier.
• Restoring focus. When Mail is running but closed, there isn’t an elegant way to restore using the keyboard. Most apps work well with a cmd-n, but in Mail that starts a new message _and_ restores the app. Great if I wanted to send a message, bad if I only want to see what’s new.

Using it to collect Gmail via POP has actually been a great experience. Gmail filters out the crap and I get a nice clean stream of email delivered to my desktop. Bonus, all my rules are still running on Gmail, so when I need access via my phone or another computer, I can and all my organization is still in effect. I do still check the spam box about once a week for false positives, but I never find any.

So, overall, I give it a C. Not the greatest (c’mon Mozilla…update Thunderbird already!) or the worst (:cough:Outlook Express:cough:) but it does the job just fine.

I’ve searched the goog, but not to extensively. If any of you have any great Mail.app tips or tricks you would like to share, by all means please do! They would be appreciated.

I’ve been using gmail exclusively since ‘05 to collect all of my email, and it’s been doing a bang up job! I love me the gMail. But, there are times when I’d rather open an app, or compose an email offline (like when travelling) or I would just like to have that information under my control 100%.

At first I thought I would try iMap with gMail. In theory, a great idea. All of the email lives on gmail, and your labels and mail is replicated in your email client. In practice however it doesn’t work that hot, at least not with Gmail. Maybe I have too many rules or labels. Maybe I get too much email. Whatever the reason, it works poorly at best. I was missing emails, or they wouldn’t show up at all in my client. Oh, and the client would almost always crash.

Back to the drawing board I went. Started using Fluid for Gmail and it kinda made it feel like I was using a desktop app. It’s a great app and I highly recommend it especially for Gmail. Watch for a write up that soon.

Let’s hide some of this, since I’ve got a fair amount more to say.

Being a fan of pretty much all things Mozilla, I decided to give Thunderbird another shot. This time not with Gmail IMAP, but with POP3.

It’s an entirely different animal.

Imagine, if you will, your email server. Sitting out there on the internet collecting emails from mom and spammers and sending them all down to your desktop to sort out after they arrive. Yea, ick. This is the #1 reason why I switched to Gmail in the first place. I have yet to find an email program that filters spam as good as Gmail does off the shelf.

Now, imagine if you will that you have a filter between your email server and your desktop. One that strips out the spam, hides it from view and only sends you the good stuff. Boy wouldn’t that be great.

That’s what it is like using Gmail for POP3.

I was a Thunderbird user on Windows for a very long time. In fact, the 2nd app I installed on the mac when I first got it was Tbird, which I was using to read news. This past week I thought it was time to fire it up and give it a shot.

Works just like it always had. Smart search, easy to set up filters and folders, the whole bit. Not terribly fast, but v2, like FireFox v2, has the feel of a Windows program that was ported to the mac.

So, I have decided to give mail.app another try. But, to be honest, I don’t think I have used a crashier piece of software except maybe AOL4.0, Netscape 4 (OMG, do you remember how bad that was?) and, more recently, Cyberduck. That was also mostly with Gmail IMAP, but it’s was pretty crashy with POP3 too. Perhaps it was me? I’m going that route for the next week and see if I can’t figure it out.

Another reason for wanting to use mail is the integration. The address book integrates with mail and iCal. iCal and mail and best buds I read someplace too. Sure would be nice to be an adult with a current calendar and address book.

Any good Mail.app tips or tricks you might have would be greatly appreciated. Don’t bother sending me to any sites with plugins or hacks tho, it’s gotta work out of the box.