Nov

24

One Email Client to Rule Them All

Filed Under Apps | Leave a Comment

Wow, haven’t posted here for a while. Forgot I had a website or something.

Anyway, I was writing away in Tiger’s Mail this morning, and it’s honestly not all that bad once you give it a little makeover. Still, it’s got a few little annoying bugs that have prompted me to check out the competition. Besides Mail, I can think of three native OS X email clients: Bare Bones’s Mailsmith, GyazSquare’s GyazMail, and Mozilla’s Thunderbird. (Entourage, you say? Don’t be silly. Also, pine, mutt, and emacs don’t count.) It’s tough to compete with an app that’s bundled with the OS, so each of these guys know that they have to bring something special to the table in order to get people to switch. Mailsmith has BBEdit’s text-fu magic, GyazMail pimps its Cocoa-ness, and Thunderbird rocks extensibility and cross-platform goodness. I’ve tried each of these applications before, but it’s been a while and the OS X mail scene has almost certainly changed since. So here, in order of preference, I present my mini-reviews on Mail’s competition. (Sidebar: I’m very harsh on Macintosh software, but even the worst of these applications is still five times better than Microsoft Outlook. I have to use Outlook at work, and even though it’s at like version 19, it is the single most infuriating piece of software I have ever used. The English language is incapable of expressing how much I loathe Outlook. I’d have to learn Klingon to really get the point across.)

Mailsmith

Bare Bones Software is kind of funny. Whether you love them or hate them, you have to admit that they occupy kind of a weird place in the Macintosh software world. BBEdit is a perfect example, and since people are probably more familiar with it than they are with Mailsmith, I’ll start there. Back in the day, BBEdit was the undisputed king of text editing on the Mac, but its mindshare has eroded somewhat since the release of OS X. Newcomers to the Mac (like myself, a real user only since the Jaguar days) take one look at BBEdit and, without exception, think ew. It’s a big, shiny, anti-aliased world out there, and while it’s easy to dismiss these folks as conflating aesthetics with usability, there are some serious usability issues with much of Bare Bones’s software, and on top of that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with demanding that a Macintosh application look good and have a modern, OS-X-style interface. It would not kill Bare Bones to hire a graphic designer like the rest of the Macintosh software industry has, or to take interface queues from applications like NetNewsWire and OmniAnything.

This isn’t to say that BBEdit and its relatives don’t take advantage of what OS X has to offer—quite the contrary. But it seems like Bare Bones has some sort of split personality disorder when it comes to embracing the future of the platform. It’s especially odd considering the future of the platform has been around for a good four years now.

On one hand, you’ve got Harvey Dent making sure some really awesome OS-X-only features like the WebKit preview, shell worksheets, bbedit command-line tool, and tons others make it into BBEdit as soon as possible. BBEdit was the first commercial product to run natively on OS X, is the only Carbon app I know of that supports Services, and had support for Automator before Tiger arrived on my doorstep.

On the other hand, you’ve got Two-Face trying his best to keep BBEdit looking and acting like something out of System 7. The Preferences dialog is cramped, confusing, and needlessly difficult to navigate. I still can’t remember which of those low-resolution, cryptic toolbar buttons go with which set of options. And I can appreciate the fact that \r was the line break character when I was still caulking wagons to float them across rivers on an LC II in the computer lab, but times change. There are no carriage returns in my Apache configuration files, so I shouldn’t be using them in my text editor’s grep search to find newlines.

To me, Mailsmith has the same kinds of issues as BBEdit does, but it lacks the phenomenal cosmic power of its cousin. As much as BBEdit annoys me, it has the cojones to make it one serious text editor. It’s light, fast, and efficient, and has a feature set unrivaled on any platform. Unfortunately, Mailsmith can’t quite pull off the same trick. It’s got some nice features, sure, and plays to many of Bare Bones’s strengths—like scriptability and text editing—but if you dislike BBEdit’s interface, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

On first launch, you get the expected “Import Existing Setup” dialog. After selecting Apple Mail, I let Mailsmith do its thing, and it quickly spits up a 143-line import log rife with errors. In all fairness, I’m thinking this is probably Mail’s fault, since the upgrade to 2.0 did a number on my existing mail and my mail archives are probably in a pretty weird state right now. So fine, no import. Mailsmith does manage to pick up my server settings, so I can download some 200 messages that were still on the server right away. Strangely, only two of these messages are marked as spam. Mail did a better job of marking spam, but I’ve been training it for a while. I’d have expected SpamSieve to do a better job out of the box, but I’ve read too many good reviews to not believe that its accuracy will improve tremendously over time.

In downloading those messages, one of the mail servers timed out, and Mailsmith popped up a very strange window to tell me this. It took up the entire height of the screen, from menu bar to Dock, to tell me about a single error, and it looked very much like a window you’d use for composing email, complete with a Reply button, which, when clicked, opened up an actual mail composition window with the To address set to me. Completely bizarre.

Now I’ve got 200 emails in my Inbox, and I need to set up some filters to sort them into folders. In Mail, the UI for this is pretty intuitive, and you can set up a series of boolean rules in pretty much the same way as you do for making smart playlists in iTunes. As an added bonus, the default values for each of the criteria are based on the message you currently have selected in the main window, making a new rule based on an existing message extremely simple. Mailsmith does not do this—you have to use a completely different dialog, accessed from a different menu—and the New Filter dialog is, as Gruber might say, annoyingly modal. This means that you have to either remember an email address exactly, or copy it to the clipboard before you open the dialog. Infuriating. To top it all off, instead of giving “+” and “-” buttons to each of the rules you create, there is one “More Criteria” button and one “Fewer Criteria” button. The “Fewer Criteria” button removes the last rule you’ve made. If you decide you want to, say, remove rule 12 after you’ve just finished removing rule 37, then you have to consult the User Manual to learn that you have to option-click the rule to select it, then select “Fewer Criteria.” Sigh.

Reading messages in Mailsmith is mostly unremarkable, since Mailsmith doesn’t display HTML messages and doesn’t thread messages, but otherwise the three-pane interface works pretty much how you’d expect. Composing messages, on the other hand, is one area where Mailsmith truly shines. Well, let me rephrase that. Actually writing the message is where Mailsmith really shines, since it basically has a mini-BBEdit (circa version 7?) bundled inside. The interface for choosing recipients, however, is, like so much else in Mailsmith, totally weird. Rather than have separate text fields for To, CC, and BCC like every mail client in the history of the world, Mailsmith recycles the text field with a drop-down menu. The three types of recipients are displayed elsewhere in the window, though, so no screen real estate is conserved. Even weirder, when you switch the drop-down menu, it still contains what you wrote before, and you have to manually delete it.

(Sidenote: while you’re beholding, make note of the “toolbar” in the upper-right of the window. The entire application makes use of those wretched little buttons, and there’s not a single actual picture to be found. In the main mail viewing window, the buttons double as little mini-menus not unlike the “PDF” button on the Tiger print dialog, except that you have to click-and-hold to actually view the menu.)

I could go on, but the point should be pretty clear now: Mailsmith is even more archaic than BBEdit, and doesn’t have a feature set that’s nearly exceptional enough to make up for it. It took me a while to come around to BBEdit, and maybe eventually I’ll come around to Mailsmith, but right now it’s just too weird for me. It’s got a screwy, ugly interface, is unbelievably expensive, and I honestly think that Bare Bones just isn’t trying to make it a real OS X application. Here’s hoping for version 3.

Mailsmith 2.1

Developer: Bare Bones Software
Price: $99
Pros: Excellent text-wrangling abilities, excellent scriptability
Cons: Bizarre, ancient interface; staggering price tag
Rating: 5 times better than Microsoft Outlook 2000

Thunderbird

I promise, this one will be shorter.

Thunderbird 1.5, which is still in beta but is fairly close to release, is the latest from the good folks at the Mozilla foundation and is the version I’ll be looking at here. Thunderbird’s disc image, like that for Firefox 1.5, has an attractive background image showing graphically that you should drag the application in to your Applications folder to install it. It would be nice if the little folder icon was actually an alias to /Applications, but such is life.

Thunderbird doesn’t yet seem to have the ability to import from any OS X mail clients. Although it pops up a dialog on first launch asking if you want to import anything, there’s only one radio button to select: “Don’t import anything.” Once you’re in the app, there’s a way to import messages and settings from Eudora and Communicator, but I’m pretty sure that neither of these have been relevant for quite some time.

Amusingly enough, at first glance, Thunderbird looks much more like an OS X application than does Mailsmith, despite being based on what I can only assume is a pretty monstrous cross-platform codebase. Of course, as with Firefox, it quickly becomes clear that most of the interface elements are just “skinned” to look like native ones. The skin is pretty good, but just isn’t quite right. Still, the basic interface is both more attractive and more intuitive than Mailsmith’s. One stumbling block, however, and it’s kind of a big one, is that it was kind of difficult to figure out how to get Thunderbird to send only plain text email. It’s kind of crappy that Thunderbird sends HTML by default, and even crappier that I had to search Google to figure out how to turn that off. The relevant text box is not in the Composition tab of the application’s Preferences, but in the Account Settings dialog under the Tools menu. Bad Thunderbird, bad!

The rest of the application is much to Apple Mail as Firefox is to Safari. It’s a great effort, and tries very hard to belong in OS X. Spell-check-as-you-type is a nice touch, and is especially important since Apple Mail and GyazMail both get it for free with their new-fangled Cocoa text views. The interface for setting up new rules is almost identical to that of Apple Mail, which is a good thing.

All in all, Thunderbird is a very solid email client. It’s got about the same level of functionality as Apple Mail, with a few geeky extras thrown in. Really, though, there’s not much to either love or hate here. This is OS X, after all, and quality applications just don’t stand out as much as they do on Windows. If you really hate Apple Mail, though, Thunderbird makes a very solid and very free replacement.

Thunderbird 1.5

Developer: Mozilla Foundation and contributors
Price: $0
Pros: Good feature set, nice interface, can’t beat the price
Cons: Has the same non-native feel as Firefox, no useful import abilities
Rating: 8 times better than Microsoft Outlook 2000

GyazMail

GyazMail’s aesthetic appeal certainly exceeds that of Mailsmith, although its toolbar icons to be a bit bland, and it’s not as pretty as Thunderbird. Also, much of the interface is inexplicably set in Helvetica instead of the standard Lucida Grande. Thankfully, this is configurable).

With some exceptions, the UI is thought out well, and there are certainly none of the whiskey-tango-foxtrot moments that you’d experience in Mailsmith. That’s not to say GyazMail is not without its problems, of course. For example, when setting the default email reader from within GyazMail, you have to choose the application itself from a standard file dialog, rather than a drop-down of installed mail clients. Excruciatingly lame, especially since GyazMail is perfectly content to let me choose iCal is my default email client. Also, it’s easy to lose track of threaded messages. GyazMail makes use of different levels of indentation to organize messages into threads, and in a crowded folder it’s sometimes difficult to visualize where a thread begins and ends. Mail solves this problem by drawing a colored background behind each thread. (Sidenote: The way these multiple levels of indentation come in to play is pretty cool. GyazMail is capable of recognizing threads within conversations. For example, if someone posts to a mailing list, GyazMail makes a distinction between replies to the original email and replies to replies. Neat.)

Unfortunately, unlike any of the other applications here, GyazMail doesn’t help you set it up. At all. On startup, you get the familiar three-paned interface, but nothing’s in it. There’s an “Import” menu item in the File menu, but it’s grayed out until you create an account. This isn’t immediately obvious, and you have to go poking around to figure it out.

Actually, this seems to be a common problem throughout GyazMail—setting up is just a pain in the neck. Too much of this setup is simply setting options that should have been set by default. For example, messages tagged as junk (by SpamSieve—GyazMail has no built-in junk filter) aren’t actually moved anywhere. Instead, you have to manually create a rule to move Junk to a folder that you create.

Other settings get annoying when you have to set them multiple times. For example, there seems to be no global setting to enable threading. You have to choose “Threaded” from the View menu for each folder. And individual accounts can have individual settings for the polling interval (which is good), but there isn’t a way to specify the interval globally (which is bad). NetNewsWire has a similar concept with its feeds, but the execution is much better.

All of these issues slow down the already slow process of setting up a new email client. The amount of time a user is willing to devote to testing out a new application is finite, and if a good chunk of time is spent on tedious overhead and not actually seeing what the application can do, I’d suspect many users are just going to give up and stick with what they have.

I’m actually surprised that none of the applications here were more successful in reducing that overhead. There’s no way to predict a user’s exact preferences, but there’s a wealth of information that can be gleaned right from Mail. Mailsmith was successful in importing account settings; GyazMail was successful in importing the actual messages. Neither was able to import Mail’s rules. In my opinion, importing everything should be a top priority on these developers’ lists. The vast majority of users are going to get by just fine with Mail. The people that won’t get by with Mail are the people who push it to its limits. Lots of rules, lots of messages. These people are going to tire of setting up your product before they’ve even had a chance to really test it out.

Imagine if a user launched one of these applications, and instead of having to look up what port GMail likes to use for its POP access, or setting new filters to route all of your mailing list traffic to various folders, he had a fully functional substitute for Mail. Now there’s that much more time for him to spend exploring what makes your application unique. Just a thought.

Anyway, as with Thunderbird, there’s just really not a lot that stands out about GyazMail. It’s a decent enough client and a capable substitute for Mail, but there’s nothing particularly compelling about it.

GyazMail 1.3.3

Developer: GyazSquare
Price: $18 (plus $25 for SpamSieve)
Pros: Decent UI, reasonable price
Cons: Bit of a pain to set up, No support for digital signatures
Rating: 8 times better than Microsoft Outlook 2000

Conclusion

After all that, it looks like I’ll be sticking with Apple Mail, bugs and all. Thunderbird and GyazMail don’t seem to offer much in the way of additional functionality. Mailsmith does, but I have a hard time learning to love its UI. As much as people love to hate Mail, I find it to be (mostly) elegant and perfectly capable for my needs.

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