Goodbye Mozilla Thunderbird. Hello Apple Mail.

I was an early adopter of Mozilla Thunderbird for many reasons – but mainly due to Microsoft Outlook’s miserable and pathetic handling of the IMAP protocol. While I continue using Thunderbird on my Sony VAIO (Windows XP) laptop, I have transitioned to Apple Mail on my PowerBook.

Why?

Apple is Apple. Apple has style and knows UI.
There’s no one out there that can (or should) deny that Apple defines style. There’s just something about the Apple Mail interface that is appealing.

The OS X version of Thunderbird is extremely slow.
Thunderbird on Windows is quick and fluid. Unfortunately, it’s almost the exact opposite on OS X. I don’t have the latest, fastest PowerBook by any means. However, it is only three years old and still very capable of running high-power applications such as Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. But Thunderbird drags from the very beginning on startup.

I recently merged all email accounts into one.
Thunderbird handled multiple IMAP accounts very well; better than Apple Mail even. But I realized that I didn’t need forty thousand email accounts to worry about checking and such. The most important additional address I used (for Sepper Designs) was no longer necessary, so it simply made sense. I’ve used various email addresses for distinct purposes such as eBay, PayPal, forums, etc. Those now just forward to my main address. Since I didn’t need multiple IMAP accounts, Apple Mail’s sub-par support for that didn’t matter.

OS X 10.5 Leopard is slated to be released sometime this fall, so I am hoping Apple Mail gets better multiple IMAP account support. Not necessarily for me since I no longer use multiple accounts, but instead for those who do and are forced to use Thunderbird or something else.

For those wondering what Apple Mail doesn’t do with regards to multiple IMAP accounts, it has to do with the “primary” folders (Sent, Trash, Junk). You’re not able to specify separate primary folders for the different accounts, so they’d be grouped together. For IMAP users, that’s a huge flaw and can be the deal breaker.

All in all, the switch was easy and painless.