[X4U] mail client app issues

[stephen e. schwartz]

At 12:00 PM -0800 3/4/14, <x4u-request at listserver.themacintoshguy.com> wrote:
>Message: 7
>Date: Tue, 4 Mar 2014 11:02:15 -0800
>From: catsoul <catsoul at thinkplan.org>
>To: "A place to discuss Mac OS X for the casual user."
>	<x4u at listserver.themacintoshguy.com>
>Subject: Re: [X4U] Mavericks performance
>
>I was having mail.app problems in 10.9, too. to be honest, it ain't 
>so hot in 10.8 now that I'm back.
>Keeping thunderbird set up and ready just in case..
>
>what are your mail.app issues?

Let me chime in here; actually maybe I can get some suggestions from 
this group.

I have 10.6.8 at work and I love it for a bunch of reasons, though it 
took our IT folks a lot of twisting my arm to upgrade from 10.4.11. I 
am afraid they will force a further "up" grade on me in the future.

I thought I could buy a macbook pro for home with 10.8 on it and 
downgrade to 10.6 but no dice. So I am stuck with 10.8 at home.

One favorite I lost was Eudora, 6.2, which I use at work. It is so 
well designed. Option click in the from list and you get all the 
messages from that address; option click in the subject list and you 
get all the messages with the same subject, including re. Lots of 
mailbox windows open at the same time, which I stack, staggered, on 
my desktop. I can readily drag messages from one mailbox to another. 
Drag an icon of an attachment from one message to a new one and 
voila. Lots of keyboard commands, command-r, reply; command-option-r, 
reply all; command-d, delete; command-shift-m to check for new mail. 
And I have all my mail here from early 1990's. It was nice at a 
meeting to bring up an email from a colleague showing that he did say 
thus and such back in 1994.

Ok, I tried several mail clients (pop) in 10.8 and settled on  ... 
drum roll ... Outlook 2011. There was just too much I couldnt do in 
Apple Mail, Thunderbird, Mailbox (if I correctly recall the name of 
the app; pretty defunct; no response to email queries).

My current issue with outlook is that if I drag a jpg into the mail 
window, some recipients on ipad or iphone just get an icon that they 
cannot open.

but outlook is typical clunky microsoft app. pulldown menus for what 
should be keyboard or drag and drop operations. takes me much longer 
to do things than on eudora. cumbersome send mail to multiple 
recipients; reqires semi-colon. And then you get little bubbles for 
the recipients and messages that tell you that they do not know the 
present whereabouts of that person.

Oh, another current issue. In some email I had an alias wrong (how 
the app gets aliases wrong sometimes and not others is a further 
mystery). So every minute it records an error message that it cannot 
send to that address; this has been going on for several days. I 
don't know how to stop it.

Oh, forgot to mention, no way to check for new mail. Yes, you can set 
outlook to check for new mail every minute. But suppose I have it set 
to check every 10 min, but then I want to check manually. No way.

these are just of the top of my head. I expect if I kept a systematic 
list of can't do's or cumbersome workarounds, I would come up with 
another dozen.

oh, yes, I just wanted to turn off my sig block in eudora; just go to 
the top of the mail window and a little pulldown menu lets me do that.

>oh yes, command-option-v puts a black line to the left of any paste, 
>whether from an earlier message or from any other app. like this.

oh, and handling of received attachments. Eudora puts attachments 
where I want them. And 99% smart enough to distinguish real 
attachments from gifs and jpgs that are inline in html messages. 
Outlook requires you to open an attachment and do a save as if you 
want to keep it somewhere accessible. And copies of the attachment 
proliferate in cache folders.

oh yes, send again. How nice to have an email template with addresses 
and the like in it, and send to same distribution. Versus, keep a 
draft email with addresses in the body that I need to open up copy, 
paste into my new message. that's my workaround for that.

I would gladly pay for an app that did all that eudora 6.2 does that 
works on 10.8.  Hint to some developer out there. These features were 
all in Eudora in the mid nineties. In a free application.

end of rant, but suggestions welcome.

thanks

-steve