When I first switched to the Mac, I installed and configured my favorite mail client, Thunderbird. OS X’s built-in mail client, Mail.app is (of course) gorgeous, and its tight integration with the OS is nice, but I was worried that it wouldn’t be up to snuff in its IMAP support, Spam filtering capabilities, and sorting features. Moreover, how I was going to use GPG to sign and encrypt my messages (a feature that’s easily added to Thunderbird by the Enigmail extension)? Well, my worrying was all in vain—as it turns out, Mail.app is more capable than I gave it credit for.
To be sure, Thunderbird has an impressive feature set: saved searches, message threading, Global Inboxes, and extension API to name a few. Well, as I found out, so does Mail.app. In fact, Mail.app has Smart Mailboxes which improve on saved searches, better threading features, and I even prefer the way multiple accounts are collected in the Global Inbox. In Thunderbird, you don’t get to group by individual accounts—they’re all just lumped together with no way to tell which is which without looking at the to header.
Spam filtering in Mail.app is just as good (if not better) than it is in Thunderbird, both of which use Bayesian filtering and cumulative rules to ‘learn’ what you consider to be Spam. Mail.app gets bonus points, however, because you can manually set additional rules in the same way you would filters to futher customize and refine things.
As for GPG (a feature I can’t do without), GPGMail for Mail.app is the answer I was looking for. For those who aren’t aware, GnuPG is a free PGP replacement. PGP stands for “Pretty Good Privacy”, and can be used to encrypt text (usually e-mail) and sign messages thus proving the identity of the original author. Simply put, GPGMail allows you to read and send PGP authenticated and/or encrypted messages right from inside Mail.app.
If anything, I’d say Mail.app has a more complete feature set than Thunderbird, although the latter makes up for this by virtue of its extension capabilities. That said, I use an extension in Thunderbird that adds a toolbar button to toggle normal/full headers of messages - in Mail.app, this feature exists out of the box. There’s also a toolbar button that toggles between threaded and un-threading message viewing - something I’ve always wished Thunderbird could do (and for which no extension exists).
Thunderbird is still highly regarded in by book due to the fact that it’s cross platform and open source (when you’re working on Mac, Windows, and Linux, it’s nice to have the same mail client accross the board). If Thunderbird were to improve its Mac support in a few areas, and were to support true OS X aqua theming, I would probably be using it in place of Mail.app for the reasons aforementioned. Sadly, it just feels out of place in an otherwise tightly knit environment. That said, Thunderbird (and Firefox for that matter) really shine on Linux—fast, responsive, and good looking.
A few tips
- To add multiple email address for an account in Mail.app: In the Preferences for the account, enter all your addresses in the email address field, separated by commas. When composing a new message, you’ll get to select which address you’d like to use in the
fromheader.
- If you’re down with GPG, you might also be interested in the Mac GPG project which brings a bunch of GUI tools to OS X. Check out GPG Keychain Access which lets you manage and create keys using a friendly GUI, and GPGPreferences for a pretty preference pane in which you can manage GPG’s option file.
