A follow up on the costs of using 'free' applications

Not everyone agrees that the bugs in the current build of Mail 1.2 are serious enough to worry about, or that choosing to rely on a for-pay application is any guarantee that it will be more reliable than a free program like Mail.

Greg Jorgensen writes:

Apple's Mail.app predates OSX. What more mature mail program for OSX would you recommend? Should we all use pine?
All kinds of software has bugs--commercial or free, or "real" and not-real as you put it. Do you think Eudora or Entourage are bug-free because they are "real" and cost money?
Any kind of software can harbor bugs, even nasty data-losing bugs. That's not specific to free software, or not-so-free software that comes bundled with the OS (like Mail.app).
All software contains bugs. The number and severity of the bugs is a function of the programmers, not the price tag.

Meanwhile, Steve Sobek added:

Mail is a great program, actually, especially under Jaguar. It's stable, reliable, and I haven't heard of too many folks complaining about this problem that Apple's update fixes. There will always be bugs in programs that need to be fixed -- always, always, always ... you get the point. And this goes for commercial apps that you pay for, too. There are plenty of horror stories involving lost info for commercial mail apps, also. I know several people who have had issues with out-of-control Entourage mail databases that have corrupted. Some managed to somehow fix the problem, others didn't.
I'm all for criticism where criticism is due, but to say people shouldn't use a program like Mail.app just because it's free is ludicrous.

Thanks for the contrary opinions. My argument still stands up, however. I don't argue against free applications just because they are free, but I do question the wisdom of relying on free applications for critical data, and as a small business owner I cannot imagine choosing Mail 1.2 as my email client when it is known to contain such a serious flaw. Of course, I already avoid using Mail 1.2 because of ease-of-use issues and the slowness of running the program on my Pismo PowerBook with 1GB of RAM. It takes 5-10 seconds to move from one mailbox to another, it can take a second or two to do something as simple as delete a message and wait for Mail to display the next message in the list, etc. So I obviously have my own bias against the current version of Mail. I have also consistently written about these bundled applications - Mail and all of the iApps - as great tools for casual use but tools that don't live up to the needs of users who have more high-end needs.

When I read about an application with serious data losing bugs, I advise people to consider applications that don't have those bugs. If your business relies on sending and receiving email, it only makes sense to choose a more reliable tool. And who knows...maybe Mail will be that more reliable tool when Apple rolls out the update to Mac OS X 10.2.1.

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