Mac Net Journal

I decided last week that it was time to give Mail.app a chance, and so I made a temporary switch from Eudora 6.x to the latest version of Mail under Panther for a multi-day test ride. I stuck with the program for a few days before deciding last night to move back to Eudora and explore other email applications due to a couple of key shortcomings in Mail.app.

There is a lot to like about Mail and it has made major improvements over previous versions. The built in Spam filters in Mail seem superior to the SpamWatch capabilities in Eudora, and the look and feel of the Mail user interface runs circles around Eudora. But the limitations that killed my user experience with Mail were threefold: the inability to apply labels to mail, the awkward process for creating Rules, and the limitations of Mail's search capabilities that were the final deal killers that sent me running back to Eudora.

Before I start digging into Mail, let me explain a little about my email requirements. I am on about a dozen email lists, each of which are filtered into individual mailboxes. I receive roughly 200 emails per day and manage three major email accounts. I also keep large email archives live in my email program of choice and I often search through the archives, especially my archive of roughly 10,000 messages about bird watching that allow me to quickly track the bird sightings posted to the Tweeters email list about birding in Washington state. It is fair to say that most email users don't keep as much email archived or have similar search requirements, so I am keeping that in mind as I write this piece.

The switch to Mail

Moving my email data from Eudora to Mail.app was actually very easy. Under the newest version of Mail in Panther all I had to do was to set the parameters for my email accounts in Mail's preferences, and then choose to import my mail. The process imported all of my Eudora mail folders without a hitch and all I had to do then was to move the mailboxes from the imported folder into a new directory structure in Mail which duplicated the folders and subfolders I was used to using in Eudora.

Importing my Eudora email contacts information was not so straight forward. There was no option to import email addresses under the Import menu item, but I did eventually, after using Mail for a couple of days, find an item under the Script menu to run an AppleScript that imported all of my Eudora contacts into Apple's Address Book application. Viola!

I only wish that it was possible to import my many mail filters from Eudora into Mail. Instead, I was forced to create new Rules to duplicate the filters, which is a much more painstaking process under Mail than it should be. In Eudora, if you want to create a new filter based on a selected message you simply go to the Special menu and select to create the filter. In PowerMail, the email program I was using before switching to Eudora in September, you simply Control-clicked on a message and were offered the option to create a filter based on that message. In Mail you have to select the message you want to base a new rule on, then go to the Preferences, select Rules, and then create the filter. This is much more complicated than control-clicking, and it was one of the most obvious initial shortcomings to Mail.app.

Everyday use of Mail

Once I had my email data moved into Mail and my filtering set up, using Mail was a breeze. The program is much faster under Panther than under Jaguar, and I still love the way that Mail can notify that I have X-number of new messages in my In box by showing that number on the application's icon in the Dock - something that Eudora cannot do. Mail's user interface is very clean and easy to use, and using it in the three-pane browser mode I found that it takes up less screen real estate on my 12-inch PowerBook G4 than Eudora does when I am using it in a three-paned browser configuration.

The first major limitation I found with Mail was that the program is much slower opening mailboxes when they have large numbers of messages in them. My Tweeters mailbox, which held messages from late 2001 through the current date - more than 9,600 messages - was dreadfully slow to open. I got around this by creating a new archive mailbox to hold all of the messages from 2002, which cut the number of messages in my active mailbox for the mailing list in half. Mail seems to struggle a bit opening mailboxes once they have 3,000 or more message in them, so this could be a factor for people who keep large mail archives.

The next major limitation I found with Mail was its inability to apply labels to individual messages. I could apply flags to messages, but at a time when OS X finally has labels built into the OS, it was frustrating that the flagship email app can't let me use labels. I use labels under Eudora to change the status of a given message in my In box and to note if a particular message needs action in the future. This functionality can be duplicated in Mail.app to some extent by creating mailboxes for messages that are in progress or need some other specific action, but I don't like that option as much as being able to see all of my critical mail in one view in the In box.

Another minor limitation of Mail is that when reading mail in the three-paned mail browser, selecting a specific message immediately marks that message as Read in the Mail user interface. In Eudora I have my interface set up to require me to either scroll through a message or to take some other explicit action before it will be marked as Read. This forces me to make a decision about what to do with each message, and it helps me avoid overlooking messages. It is a minor issue related to the way I handle email, but it remains at issue for me.

On the plus side, Mail.app has made significant improvements in the way it handles attachments under the current version. A Save button accompanies any attachment received from other users and allows the user to select where the attachment will be saved on an individual basis. And when attaching a file to an outgoing message there is an option to send a Windows friendly attachment rather than a default style of attachment. I didn't have the opportunity to fully test the encoding methods in the Windows friendly attachment options, but it is good to see that the Mail engineers have found an easy way to let users change the encoding on specific attachments without requiring the Mail user to specifically understand the difference between an AppleDouble or a UUencoded or AppleSingle encoded attachment.

The deal killer, and why I am back to using Eudora

I was willing to overlook the shortcomings in Mail until last night because the program is so much faster than it used to be and it simply looks better than Eudora. But when I started trying to search through my email with Mail I encountered the biggest shortcoming of the program. Mail generally does a good job with searches, but the program requires the user to select a specific mailbox to search rather than allowing the user to select a folder of mailboxes or even to search the entire email archive. This just doesn't cut it. I have a Birding folder that holds individual mailboxes for five mailing lists, and I should be able to search that entire folder by selecting the Birding folder and doing a search of all of the sub-folders or mailboxes held in that folder. Search doesn't work this way under Mail. Mail also displays its results in the same browser window as it uses to display incoming email, so if I do a search and then notice that I have something new in my In box that I need to look at, clicking to look at my In box obliterates the search results that were previously shown in the mail browser. Under both PowerMail and Eudora a search displays its results in a new window, which allows me to hold onto those search results if I need to go back into my normal email.

After a few days of using Mail.app, I can say without reservation that the current version offered under Panther is one of the best email applications for Mac OS X, and it should be a worthwhile email solution for most Mac users. But if your email requirements and habits are similar to mine, Mail may force you to make some compromises. The costs of those compromises were too high for me, and so I have returned to using Eudora 6.x for the time being, and I may take another look at PowerMail combined with SpamSieve for junk mail filtering again in the near future. And to head off the questions, I am aware of other email applications such as Entourage and Mailsmith. I have Entourage available to me, but I have no interest in using it. Mailsmith does appeal to me, but the cost of the application is simply too high for me to buy a license and put it to a thorough test. I already own licenses for Eudora and PowerMail... Discuss

Update: Many folks have pointed out that the search interface shortcomings that I noted in my review of Mail.app can be overcome with a little further investigation. This is great news! I do think that Apple needs to do some polishing of its user interface to make these capabilities more obvious, but at least searching does work in a much more sophisticated manner than it appeared to me in my initial review.

The issues with labeling messages and Mail's inability to work with large mailboxes has not been disputed so far, but the discussion linked above does offer some workarounds for those willing to dig deeper...