Robot Journal

The Latest robotic musings

On Mail

October 7

After years of dealing with Apple Mail’s (hereafter Mail.app’s) shortcomings I figured it was time to go looking for something new. To this end, I’ve been trying a new mail application at work called Postbox.

It’s surprising how few full-featured mail packages there are for the Mac. For years there have only been a handful, in fact. And so far, for shear ease of setup and use, none could touch Mail–lacking though it may be in so many departments. What’s wrong with Mail.app, anyway? For starters, it has very few obvious tools for organizing and categorizing mail. The one blunt instrument solution for making sense of your inbox are smart mailboxes. They work much like their iTunes counterparts: you select some filters and voila, mail that fits those filters winds up in “playlists” in the lefthand message pane. It’s a one-size solution though; mail that’s categorized in this way still appears in the main message view and isn’t highlighted or badged in any way. And without keeping the default Cocoa color picker open at all times, there’s just no way to color code your mail.

Postbox supports a form of tagging (topics, in the app’s parlance) and one-button archiving, as well as tabbed browsing for your inbox, sent mail and other folders. Topics can be color coded as well. In addition, Postbox ships with some predefined search tabs. These are basically rules in tab form that, when clicked, show all the images, attachments, or links in your inbox. This is really handy when you’re searching for an attachment whose filename (or filetype) you partially remember, but whose sender you’ve long since forgotten. Similarly, each email message includes a small pane on the right side allowing you to access the same types of features with the sender as a filter, i.e., click to show all attachments from John Smith. It’s very handy and well executed.

Postbox also has some tacked-on but not totally frivolous extra features, like the ability to post to Twitter and Facebook from inside the app. Everyone else does this, so why not, right? The interfaces for both tasks are clean and unobtrusive.

Not as simple are the interfaces for setting up accounts and preferences. It was easy enough for me, because Postbox just slurped up all my Mail.app settings (which it does very nicely.) But I could see being frustrated by this part of the setup if I were doing it from scratch. It’s not that it’s impossible, but that the UI is split into two separate parts–one for accounts and another for general settings–and it seems those should all be in one place to me.

Mail.app consolidates all these preferences, but editing accounts is oddly executed. Account info seems like the type of stuff that could be easily lumped into some sort of visual template–like a carousel-type interface–and edited in a smarter way than just editing form fields. It seems like no one executes this well. And Thunderbird doesn’t even read Mail.app’s config, so you’re forced into the seventh ring of hell known as “using things made by Mozilla.”

Frankly, I think the arcane configuration email requires could be one thing contributing to “zero config” communication platforms like Twitter. Everytime I setup multiple email accounts in Mail I see myself in black and white, throwing my hands up and making the universal “WTF” face while the announcer says ‘There’s got to be a better way!’ Postbox is certainly, in many ways, better. It improves dramatically on certain aspects of Mail.app and comes up with some novel tricks of its own. Probably the largest drawback to Postbox is its $29 price tag. It’s not that the price is out of line, but that the vast majority of its competition is free or bundled. I also think there are enough refugees from Mail.app (who have waited with each OS X revision for basic upgrades, to no avail) and Entourage (who hate life because they use Entourage) who will pay to stop the suffering. I could see doing it myself.