Switching Mail Clients: Postbox

Mail.app on mac has a number of small but sometimes very annoying quirks which require third party plugins. For example, the well known winmail.dat problem or Outlook users not being able to open attachements. Beside that, there’s a couple of weird “design decisions” the development team took, like for example, if you write an HTML e-mail, the receiving client doesn’t display text formatting as you think it would. Instead, it just uses it’s default text styling, which in case of Outlook is Times New Roman, 12pt. In short: fugly. There’s workarounds for everything, but I just want to write mails for crying out loud.

So I was looking into alternative clients for mac. Without resorting to use Outlook on mac, there’s basically only one solution which has a decent user

interface and a solid set of features including signing e-mails using certificates, archiving, a proper indexing and so on: Postbox.

Postbox is, from what I understand, a forked version of Thunderbird. Seems like there are even some Gecko developers involved. It’s not free, however.

I was also giving Sparrow and Thunderbird a try, but Sparrow is too restricted on features for my taste, whereas Thunderbird on Mac hasn’t managed to get “multi line message preview”, despite the fact that there was a feature request for such a feature nearly 10 years ago, in 2003. That’s kind of sad. Also, Mozilla stated that they will not continue to actively develop features for Thunderbird. That sounds rather grim.

Anyhow. Until something better arrives, I will be using Postbox. Not because it’s the greatest client around, but because every other option is missing one or more features I consider mandatory for a “real” mail client. I have a feeling in my stomach that I will, sooner or later, have a more in-depth look at Outlook on mac, even tho this already gives me a sour taste in my mouth by just thinking about the possibility that I might switch to Outlook. Urgs. :)