Six months later
It has been about 6 months since I made the switch from the powerful but antiquated and abandoned Eudora email program to Apple's Tiger Mail application. As someone who had been a Eudora user for over a decade, this was a pretty major switch. Now that I am six months into the transition, I've gotten to know Mail pretty well and there are several really cool things about it, and a few major frustrations.
The Good:
Perhaps the nicest thing about Mail is that it is modern! The UI is from the 21st century, and, well, it looks good. HTML email is rendered properly (Eudora has never been able to do this) and almost everything looks and works the way it is supposed to. This make a real difference in day-to-day use; I mean, I spend a lot of time in Mail, and having a better user experience makes things more pleasant in general. I never realized how ugly Eudora was until I had to go back into it recently to dig out an old email message.
The searching is top-notch also, thanks to Spotlight. Within Mail, this feature really works well, quickly and accurately finding many needles in haystacks. The live filtering and smart folders also help make for a very flexible way of instantly categorizing and organizing mail messages beyond what I have seen in any other client.
The Bad:
The junk mail filter needs some work. Actually, it is very, very good with minimal training, and you will quickly achieve about a 98% accuracy. However, it is still "bad" because it allows many very obvious spam messages to get through. We're not talking about anything that is obscured by tricky spammers, just really obvious emails full of correctly-spelled plain-text come-ons for penis pills, sex sites, mortgages and other common spam subjects. There's a technical reason for this, having to do with Apple's method of spam filtering, but no matter how cool this technique is, seeing obvious stuff get through (even when tough spam is caught) is like a basketball player who routinely hits 3-point shots but can't make a free throw to save his life!
Another flaw in Mail is that I cannot figure out an easy way to make a "whitelist" -- that is, set up a series of filters in mail that will moves messages into specific folders, and then as a "final" filter, move everything else into the trash or a quarantine folder. In Eudora you could just make a rule that ran last to do this, but in Mail this didn't work for me. However, I may just not have figured out how to do this, so user error might be rearing its head!
The Ugly:
I've actually found a pretty significant bug in Tiger Mail. If you are like most people with a broadband connection, you leave Mail running and have it check for new mail every 5 minutes or so. Due to the nature of the internet on rare ocassions, your mail server will reject your (correct) password. If you try again a second later, it will work again. Most e-mail programs, when this occurs will let you know this happened, but they will go ahead and try again when the next time to check mail occurs. Apple Mail doesn't do this. It puts up a (worthless) "please enter your password" dialog and will refuse to check mail again until you manually go offline and back online (or re-enter your password). This means that mail will, at random times, just stop checking for new messages until you manually intervene. This is insanely annoying and almost (I said almost) makes me want to go back to Eudora.
So will I stick with Apple Mail?
For now, yes, without a doubt. I've heard rumors that a modern Eudora will ship next summer, but that is probably about as real as a Sasquatch, so I won't get my hopes up. Mail is certainly "good enough" and in some areas it is more then good. Hopefully Apple will continue addressing its flaws and make it even better.
It has been about 6 months since I made the switch from the powerful but antiquated and abandoned Eudora email program to Apple's Tiger Mail application. As someone who had been a Eudora user for over a decade, this was a pretty major switch. Now that I am six months into the transition, I've gotten to know Mail pretty well and there are several really cool things about it, and a few major frustrations.
The Good:
Perhaps the nicest thing about Mail is that it is modern! The UI is from the 21st century, and, well, it looks good. HTML email is rendered properly (Eudora has never been able to do this) and almost everything looks and works the way it is supposed to. This make a real difference in day-to-day use; I mean, I spend a lot of time in Mail, and having a better user experience makes things more pleasant in general. I never realized how ugly Eudora was until I had to go back into it recently to dig out an old email message.
The searching is top-notch also, thanks to Spotlight. Within Mail, this feature really works well, quickly and accurately finding many needles in haystacks. The live filtering and smart folders also help make for a very flexible way of instantly categorizing and organizing mail messages beyond what I have seen in any other client.
The Bad:
The junk mail filter needs some work. Actually, it is very, very good with minimal training, and you will quickly achieve about a 98% accuracy. However, it is still "bad" because it allows many very obvious spam messages to get through. We're not talking about anything that is obscured by tricky spammers, just really obvious emails full of correctly-spelled plain-text come-ons for penis pills, sex sites, mortgages and other common spam subjects. There's a technical reason for this, having to do with Apple's method of spam filtering, but no matter how cool this technique is, seeing obvious stuff get through (even when tough spam is caught) is like a basketball player who routinely hits 3-point shots but can't make a free throw to save his life!
Another flaw in Mail is that I cannot figure out an easy way to make a "whitelist" -- that is, set up a series of filters in mail that will moves messages into specific folders, and then as a "final" filter, move everything else into the trash or a quarantine folder. In Eudora you could just make a rule that ran last to do this, but in Mail this didn't work for me. However, I may just not have figured out how to do this, so user error might be rearing its head!
The Ugly:
I've actually found a pretty significant bug in Tiger Mail. If you are like most people with a broadband connection, you leave Mail running and have it check for new mail every 5 minutes or so. Due to the nature of the internet on rare ocassions, your mail server will reject your (correct) password. If you try again a second later, it will work again. Most e-mail programs, when this occurs will let you know this happened, but they will go ahead and try again when the next time to check mail occurs. Apple Mail doesn't do this. It puts up a (worthless) "please enter your password" dialog and will refuse to check mail again until you manually go offline and back online (or re-enter your password). This means that mail will, at random times, just stop checking for new messages until you manually intervene. This is insanely annoying and almost (I said almost) makes me want to go back to Eudora.
So will I stick with Apple Mail?
For now, yes, without a doubt. I've heard rumors that a modern Eudora will ship next summer, but that is probably about as real as a Sasquatch, so I won't get my hopes up. Mail is certainly "good enough" and in some areas it is more then good. Hopefully Apple will continue addressing its flaws and make it even better.
posted by Mike at
3:28 PM
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