After at least 2 years of being faithful to Mozilla’s Thunderbird email client, I am switching to Apple’s Mail. This might be temporary if Mozilla comes out with a universal binary soon, but Mail is just so much faster. Thunderbird takes a while to launch and even longer to display messages that have already been downloaded. This is because Thunderbird for Mac is still a PPC application and has yet to make its debut as a UB. Chances are there is a beta UB in the works, as I am using a beta UB of Firefox, dubbed v1.5.0.2, right now.
I decided just to test out how fast Mail was, so I created my mail.gatech.edu account in Mail, configured all the necessary server settings like TLS and SSL then was ready to test it out. I timed Mail from how long it took after clicking the dock icon to the time the application loaded and the window came up. Less than 2 seconds – I’m talking instantaneous. It had loaded, connected to the gatech.edu mail server and checked for new mail insanely fast. It took Thunderbird 17 seconds to do the exact same. I rest my case.
Mail had not really taken my fancy previously, but I have taken to heart the sleek design. It is made to be a small application, window-size wise, so it’s not a resolution real estate hog. Thunderbird, even squished to its limits, takes up more space. Now I have to find some nice Mail icons.
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wow that is a big deferance I can’t wait to get my intel mac mini in may!
I am finding the samething. I use Mozilla Thunderbird on Windows and Linux (as old as Red Hat 7.3) and they are much faster than the Mac versions. I have even tried compiling it from source on Mac OS X and that seemed to do better. I wish Mozilla would put some time into Mac OS X development!! (Or maybe even Apple?)
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I don’t know if you stumbled upon this yet but in fact there already are universal binaries out there. tried them in 10.4.3 and working great so far.
perhaps just have a look at:
thunderbird 1.5.0.2:
http://www.ms1.de/download/thunderbird-1.5.0.2.en-US.mac.universal.dmg
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Mac:Intel
http://josh.trancesoftware.com/mozilla/thunderbird-1.5.intel.mac.dmg
regards from germany,
sebastian
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Okay I just tried the UB beta of Thunderbird and it took around 11 seconds to boot up. Mail still wins. :-P
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I’m an Apple user. I like anything Apple. However, before I decided to switch to Apple Mail, I previously used Entourage. Just isn’t the same. Apple can fetch my mail quicker and faster than Entourage. However, I’ve never tried Thunderbird before… results may vary.
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In case you or anyone else uses “Mai” then this site provides some good add ons to Mail.
http://www.tikouka.net/mailapp/
Enjoy
Victor Cajiao
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Congratulations.
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You need Gmail, my friend. It keeps all my mail nicely in one place and I can download all of it via POP3 if I need to. Email from everywhere.
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I personal don’t like anything WebMail Based because when I am at on the Subway or at School (No WiFi yet :-( ) and really need to accuse some email I can’t because it is all online. Thought I do think that Gmail really rock, Except of cource for POP3.
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Pat, I use gmail for my personal email but for campus email we have to have an email client.
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Welsome to Mail. You have to try out MailTags and MailActon. They will fill some niches to make a wholesome application.
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Well, I use Gmail web-based as well as their new mobile client.
Actually apart from deep filtering I don’t see the use of a client. it used to solve spam/storage problems 5 years ago but those problems have become part of history;
I ‘ve been a long time yahoo Mail user (I actually own the Yahoo mail group) but recently switch to a faster clean Gmail.
Apart from from those non-webbased accounts, I just dunno the value of a mail software…
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Mail has given me some mayor problems. Apparently in OSX 10.4.7 and 10.4.8 mail can cause (and did so twice in the course of 4 months in my case) file corruptions in files as remote from Mail as charset.jar (in the Java 1.4.2 folder) and the printer definitions. It corrupts these files, so that they can no longer be copied, and brings Mail and the entire system to a grinding halt.
There’s talk online about this being caused by some action in mail while an attachement is open in an external application.
Beware!