X-Ray Mac Posted November 11, 2007 Share Posted November 11, 2007 I'm debating between the two and not too sure if there is anything real different in them.. opinions? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
waradmin Posted November 11, 2007 Share Posted November 11, 2007 I personally love apple mail, I think its a great app and I use it to check my 6 email addresses. It is light weight, and fast. I have never been a fan of thunderbird, Mail has just worked better for me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neogeo Posted November 11, 2007 Share Posted November 11, 2007 I cannot speak for newer versions of mail.app but the one in 10.3.9 sucks. the database for your emails is prone to corruption and on 10.4 I have seen a bug where it displays jibberish in preview mode. I prefer thunderbird with the excellent lightning calander plugin. Thunderbird is stable, fast, does pop3 and imap, has numerous plugins and there .mbox standard is compatible with other apps. apple uses there own version of mbox. now, leopards mail may be improved but in my workplace (200 macs) I have seen issues with mail and I have put many on thunderbird and no more problems. I would say thunderbird, then entourage, then mail. We tie in to imap groupwise backend and it is quite compatible. Also, Thunderbird is opensource and I love opensource! Good Luck. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
waradmin Posted November 11, 2007 Share Posted November 11, 2007 I have Leopard and enjoy the mail app, I never used it in 10.3 so I cant comment. Mail does do pop3 and imap, so it doesn't differ from thunderbird in that respect. My mail db in Apple Mail is around 4000 messages in size, and it has worked fast and flawlessly. Searching is instant, and sorts results in a great way. I prefer using iCal so I need no calendar integration. If you like large mail apps like outlook for pc take a look at Entourage, it is a really powerful mail application for OS X (part of the office family). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neogeo Posted November 11, 2007 Share Posted November 11, 2007 I have Leopard and enjoy the mail app, I never used it in 10.3 so I cant comment. Mail does do pop3 and imap, so it doesn't differ from thunderbird in that respect. My mail db in Apple Mail is around 4000 messages in size, and it has worked fast and flawlessly. Searching is instant, and sorts results in a great way. I prefer using iCal so I need no calendar integration. If you like large mail apps like outlook for pc take a look at Entourage, it is a really powerful mail application for OS X (part of the office family). agreed. I am sure apple has improved mail in the latest version. Entourage is nice but Thunderbird is catching up fast, T-bird with Lightning plugin is a nice free client. It is themeable as well so you can even use a mail.app skin if you please... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
~pcwiz Posted November 11, 2007 Share Posted November 11, 2007 I dunno..I personally prefer Apple Mail. Haven't had any problems with it. But Thunderbird is also a good client. It really doesn't matter which one you use. They both send and receive email so why bother? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
blackturtleneck Posted November 11, 2007 Share Posted November 11, 2007 I replaced Outlook with Thunderbird in our organization due to it being more imap friendly, non-Microsoft and stable. When we started our move to Macs I evaluated Thunderbird, Mail and Entourage and can say without a doubt, Mail is far superior. It works great with imap and is much more user friendly. For our remaining PC's we are still using Thunderbird and dealing with it's many annoying, minor bugs. Bugs like 50% of the time if you forward an email with images, the images disappear. Or the longstanding bug where hitting the space bar doesn't advance the cursor until you type a character after it. Regressions happen too, such as one update that stopped any new mail indication if the sort was newest at the top. Every one of these is a support call I have to deal with. Being open source is great but the quality control sucks. In Tiger, Mail was good, in Leopard it's even better. As much of a fan I am of Firefox, Thunderbird seems clunky. It fits in on a PC but not on a Mac. Entourage is a headache. A big, Tylenol 3 sized headache. Maybe with an Exchange server it might be ok but it's a pain to use with anything else. We put it on the first couple Macs we gave to our sales staff. Apart from the fact that it takes bloody ages for it to open due to it not being universal yet, it's what I'd call hostile to an imap server. It opens way too may connections, doesn't close them half the time, and constantly times out. Mailbox and address book corruption too. I had more calls that started with "How do I..." than with any other program I've ever supported. It's a freaking email client, not the command console to the space shuttle, it should be at least a little intuitive. In short, Mail - good, Thunderbird - ok if you like the linux way of doing things, Entourage - shoot yourself first. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SDRacer48 Posted November 11, 2007 Share Posted November 11, 2007 I'm debating between the two and not too sure if there is anything real different in them.. opinions? Thunderbird, 1. It has a great calander extension called lightning. 2. You can remotely access your calanders from an FTP server (lightning required). 3. Works great with all the major email suppliers (yahoo, gmail, aol, etc.). 4. Cross platform similarity, no matter where you use it (Windows, Linux, OS X), it is pretty much the same. 5. Cross platform mailbox sharing, I have all my mail in folders on a SHARE partition in which each operating system (Quad Boot) can access my saved mail. 6. Haven't given Mail (either Mac Mail or Window Mail) a try, mainly because I do not need to. Keep on macKIN' Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KaiNeR Posted November 11, 2007 Share Posted November 11, 2007 hands down apple mail Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
X-Ray Mac Posted November 11, 2007 Author Share Posted November 11, 2007 Thanks for the heads up on everything guys. I think I'll end up using Mail for now, but I have Thunderbird in case of anything. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FUKKU Posted November 13, 2007 Share Posted November 13, 2007 It is themeable as well so you can even use a mail.app skin if you please... i hate this argument. just because something LOOKS right on your OS doesn't mean it WORKS right. it's why i still consider firefox 2.0 on macs to be {censored} even with a decent-looking skin for the record i use thunderbird and outlook on pcs and mail.app on macs. mail.app is my favorite, thunderbird being a close second. but i only use IMAP, if you need to hook up to exchange or something you'll need a microsoft product. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
waradmin Posted November 14, 2007 Share Posted November 14, 2007 i hate this argument. just because something LOOKS right on your OS doesn't mean it WORKS right. it's why i still consider firefox 2.0 on macs to be {censored} even with a decent-looking skin I second that. Firefox runs like junk on mac's anyway, Safari is the way to go if you ask me (on Leopard). I used to skin my Windows to look almost identical to OS X, but it wasn't until I got my Macbook before I realized its not the skin that makes OS X and its applications great, its the functionality and stability. Mail is stable, solid, and works like a champ. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bushmills Posted November 15, 2007 Share Posted November 15, 2007 Thunderbird under Win/ecs1.2/ubuntu/Mac on a Shared Partition. Great Software for all Plattforms. I really like it. Apple Mail is for Mac only maybe a good mailer, but thats all about, i dont really like it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alessandro17 Posted November 16, 2007 Share Posted November 16, 2007 I haven't tried Leopard yet. But at the moment I use Mozilla Thunderbird on all my operating systems, and I have done so for years. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
A.I.Ghost Posted November 16, 2007 Share Posted November 16, 2007 While being on Windows and Kubuntu i was using Thunderbird, stable enough (in comparison to the M$ unnamed product). Then i moved to mac and i must say, that mail is more suited for me. It's more intuitive, lighweighted and i also use imap ssl_cert mailboxes only, where Mail.app is just faster than T-bird (my main mailbox is about 1.63gig with ~50new messages a day =) ). I havent tried all the possibilities on mail yet though - like advanced anti-spam and forward/autoanswer scripting - that might change my prefs. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Boot Camp Posted December 14, 2007 Share Posted December 14, 2007 Apple Mail, I love just about all apple programs. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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