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December 16, 2006
Mail App Bleg
Will the Boz make it to a computer in time to post today? Only time will tell! But since I plan to go out later and wouldn't be able to cover for him if he fails, I'm writing Todd a safety post. This time I'm going to take this genre places it's never gone before, seeing as I'm one of its founders and all.
A while back Todd posted about his skepticism of internet applications, and the time I was a sympathetic Thunderbird user. But in the intervening months, I started autoforwarding my other email accounts, and now I live with a Gmail tab constantly open. Thunderbird only ever gets launched to do the occasional archiving. I've gotten used to some of the more cloying aspects of the interface, and while it does pretty much what I want it to, it's still not perfect. Then again, neither was Thunderbird. So here are two things I never found a way to get working that would influence my choice of mail client:
- The only two options for accessing your Gmail via POP are to leave all your messages intact or delete them all. So back in my Thunderbird days, I would go for weeks without using the Gmail interface and then have hour-long cleaning sessions where I added categories, deleted junk, and archived mail I'd read long before. I'm guessing that changing directions so that Gmail is where I read my mail primarily is the only way to get around this problem, although I'd be happy if it's not.
- This is a somewhat more minor, but consequently vastly more annoying problem. Recently I've been using mail groups more than before to contact specific sets of people. This feature itself is widely available, but for some reason neither Thunderbird not Gmail (that I can see) include a function to do the reverse - sort mail based on the recipient being a member of that group. I'm perfectly willing to accept if I'm just an idiot and this is easy to do, but as I wasn't about to create a different filter for every group member, this has been a thorn in my side for months now.
Posted by tony at December 16, 2006 2:59 PM
Comments
Wait, why did you have to occasionally into GMail to categorize stuff? I only ever log into GMail to look up something when I'm away from home, and then I use the very impressive search features. Filing things in GMail seems like a waste of time.
Posted by: todd. at December 16, 2006 7:09 PM
is a good question. the relevant answer is that there are times when i'm away from firebird, and i get irritated when my mail isn't in order. that's obviously a personal problem, not a software problem, but it's still a problem and one i would expect software to solve for me.
Posted by: tony at December 16, 2006 11:37 PM
So dare I ask to what extent do you guys organize your email?
Posted by: Keith at December 17, 2006 9:35 AM
To no extent at all, of late.
Posted by: todd. at December 17, 2006 10:04 AM
In a bit of a fortuitous conincidence, the ICS hackers mailing list just had a discussion of the best mail app in OS X, which may be of interest to you. In particular, there are some suggestions of plug-ins to make Mail.app more powerful.
Posted by: todd. at December 20, 2006 4:07 PM
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