Mail revisited

I did an experiment last night, trying out Mail as my e-mail client for a few hours. I haven't used Mail since last November, when I bought a license to PowerMail, but Apple has updated Mail twice since I left the fold, so I thought it would be good to take another look at the program. My conclusion: I am using PowerMail again this morning.

Mail still does an admirable job handling simple e-mail needs, but it still has a cumbersome filtering (or mail rules, as Apple refers to them) system. And there are still common problems with the program. For instance, this morning as I sat down to my computer to see what mail had trickled in overnight I found that Mail had stopped checking my e-mail sometime during the night and instead displayed a couple of error messages about problems it had connecting to my mail server. Once I dismissed those two error messages, the mail flowed into the program as it should have been doing all night.

Someone at Apple simply doesn't understand. It is great to let users know that there was a problem checking their mail - all programs do this - but it is not right to halt all activity until the user dismisses these warning dialogs. To make matters worse, the warning dialogs appear on top of all other active windows on my desktop, intruding on whatever else I am doing at the time.

My other minor complaints about Mail remain: Poor keyboard navigation, slow window switching that seems to be related to the message-fade effects in the program, and the constant spinning of the program activity icon as Mail indexes messages in the background.

The virtues of Mail remain: in-line spell checking, a simple user interface, simple configuration options that should appeal to many beginning e-mail users. Mail knows its audience, caters to those who want a simple mail client, and other than missing a few critical features like more intelligent filtering (which even beginning e-mail users will need once they start receiving Spam) and poor keyboard navigation, Mail is a solid choice for light use.

For my tastes, the current crop of e-mail clients still stacks up the same as it did when I wrote my round-up of e-mail clients for MacAddict late last year. PowerMail and Eudora still stand on top of the heap for stand-alone e-mail clients (meaning e-mail clients that can be purchased as separate programs, rather than something like Entourage which is only available when bundled with the overpriced Office vX software). MailSmith looks like an interesting new addition, and Mail probably sits somewhere on the bottom of the pack. But these are my personal preferences. If you can get by with a simple e-mail client, then Mail may rank near the top of the list, along with other easy-to-use programs like SweetMail.

Rob McNair-Huff is a longtime Mac user and writer from the Pacific Northwest. In addition to writing about the Mac, and running this Web site, Mac Net Journal, he is the author of two books - Insiders' Guide to the Olympic Peninsula and Mountain Bike America: Washington - and he is working with his wife Natalie to write a third book this year called Birding Washington. If you have a need for Mac consulting, writing, Web design or photography help, check out Rob's business site: White Rabbit Publishing.