>After testing the lot, is Apple Mail the answer or the new >Thunderbird?
As far as I am concerned, they both have a major annoying issue. And both are related to replies. Thunderbird (at least the stock downloaded version), appears to only quote an entire reply when replying to an email. It doesn't let you quote just part of a previous email (yes, you can edit the quoted material it puts in, but I prefer to highlight what I want to quote, hit reply, and have just that portion quoted in the reply). Thunderbird also has no Redirect feature built in (it is available via a plug in, but the icon for the plug in is out of alignment and looks stupid as a result... I know, that is just being anal, but it annoys me ok... how freaking hard would have been for the plug in designer to check the icon alignment and get it correct in the first place!) Mail on the other hand will quote just the selected portion of the reply, but only lets you reply above the quote. This means after I click reply, I also have to move the cursor to below the quoted section so I can reply properly inline with the quoted material. Mail also inserts your signature as soon as the email is created, which is just bloody annoying (on the upside, it does allow you to tweak the sig easily for a given email, but since I never do that, I just find it annoying that it is there in my way). So given that neither made me perfectly happy, I decided that since Mail was at least acceptable, and it was supported by Apple's other iApps and thus better integrated with the whole Mac experience, that I would just stick with Mail. I've been using it for a little while now, and so far it is doing its job. If I could just get that dang reply above the quote issue resolved, then I think I'd have no serious complaint over Mail. Oh wait, scratch that, I do have one other, the way it handles skipping messages over x size. I do that regularly because I check my work email from home, but have no desire to actually download any of the attachments clients send me for jobs. So I tell it to skip anything over 50k. However, Mail does a few annoying things with this. 1: It asks me if I want to skip each message as it comes to it. Um, yeah, that is why I set the preference... don't ask me, just do it! 2: It skips the ENTIRE message, so I can't read the body text, that forces me to download some emails in their entirety because I know there is info I need to read in the email. I would prefer it be like Emailer and download the first 50k of the email. 3: It doesn't remember that you told it to skip a message between quits. As long as you leave Mail running, it knows not to ask again about a given email, but if you quit Mail and start it again it will ask you again if you want to download the message. But, this will not be a problem for me too much longer as Mail supports IMAP which is a better solution for what I am trying to do (IMAP only downloads the headers of a message). Once I finish migrating my mail server to my new server, I'll be able to switch the affected account over to IMAP instead of POP so I'll no longer have to deal with skipping messages over a certain size. So all said and done, I decided to go with Mail simply because the problems I have with it were no worse than Thunderbird (actually, I find the quoting of Thunderbird MORE annoying), and none of the problems I have with Mail justified me shelling out money for an email client, and Mail is better integrated with the OS and will be updated by Apple and included with the Software Updates as needed. I still however use Emailer at work on my Mac OS 9 machine. Someday I may put OS X on this machine, and when I do, I'll think about moving to Mail, but likely will continue with Emailer under Classic. -chris <http://www.mythtech.net> ___________________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe send a mail message with a SUBJECT line of "unsubscribe" to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> or <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
