• 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.

Starting with not an app. An external hard drive for Time Machine. You need to backup as often as possible. Might I recommend any of the Western Digital MyBook external drives. Shoot for the dual-interface model if you can (Firewire and USB). Firewire is better on the Mac. And Faster. And, you can boot to it.

If you want a backup solution other than Time Machine, I would recommend SuperDuper. $30 and worth every penny.

We will begin with the free apps.

Before you do anything else, get a copy of Quicksilver (free) and install it. If you used the ‘run’ box in Windows (or many keyboard shortcuts), you will use this all the time. After it is installed, go into System Preference –> Spotlight and uncheck menu keyboard shortcut at the bottom. Then, whenever you press cmd-space, Quicksilver will come up and be ready.

For video, you will need Flip4Mac and Perian. Download and install both of them and you will be able to play any video you come across. Another good one to have is the VLC Player. This app plays everything, but I only use it to play the odd video files that quicktime won’t (high def .mkv files in particular). And, if you are one that likes to rip your DVD’s to your machine, Handbrake is the only way to go.

For IM, iChat works very well, but it is limited to AIM users mostly. If you need to use Yahoo, MSN, gTalk or Jabber, you are gonna need Adium. If you need to video chat with Windows users (yahoo or MSN) you can’t. But, you can with Skype.

As for browsers, you have many many choices. The Mac does come with Safari, but if you are switching from Windows you will hate it. Likewise you will hate Firefox 2 because it is very slow on the Mac. If you are downloading today, I would recommend Firefox 3 RC1 RC2 and get the full version when it comes out next month. You could also try Camino, but you might get laughed at. Oh yea, Opera runs here too, as does Flock.

For email, everyone swears by mail.app, but I’m not a fan. I’m also a gMail user. But I have tried Mozilla Thunderbird on the Mac and it works like it does on Windows.

If you have to log into a windows machine, I would highly recommend Remote Desktop. Sure it’s a M$ app, but it works very well and it’s free. You get file transfer and clipboard access, plus remote printer access as well. If you need to use VNC, you are stuck with the horrible Chicken of the VNC. I say horrible, but I’m used to the much more feature-rich VNC clients on Windows like Ultra (not available for the Mac).

For FTP, there are a bunch. Filezilla on the free tip is popular, as is Cyberduck which I’m not a fan of. Beside the avian icon it brings, I found it to be less than stable. If you don’t mind paying a few bucks, I will highly recommend Transmit by the good lads at Panic Software. $30 and it works great, plus integrates with Quicksilver nicely.

Finally, unless you absolutely have to have Microsoft Office, try to get ‘08. ‘03 will be cheaper but it’s slow. If you are thinking OpenOffice, don’t. They are working on an official port or you can try NeoOffice for native support. But it’s slow and cumbersome. If you don’t need office, for sure go with iWork. It’s cheaper, faster and works quite well. You will have to do a bit of re-learning like everything else on the Mac, but you will find it’s worth it.

If you are going to do any video editing or need to convert from one video type to another, you will have to get QuickTime Pro ($35) from Apple or Visual Hub. I recommend VH here because it supports a wide range of files and it’s fast.

Of course this is far from a complete list. But it should be enough to get you going. Of course you are going to want to keep an eye on the comments since I’m pretty sure the other w(t)f readers are going to want to chime in.