inamerrata

I can’t say I’m surprised to find most of the alternative MUAs to Apple’s Mail.app are shareware. What I am surprised is to find that they’re not terribly functional — and some aren’t even pretty! Mail.app’s threading support is pretty basic: it’ll collect related messages together, highlight related messages, and let you collapse a thread into a single line. Fine, fair enough, it’s free and came with the OS. But apparently that’s actually some of the better support for threading available in the Mac world! And meanwhile, other clients don’t even support IMAP. Geez, I’d say join the 21st century already, but it’s not like you could even write programs for Mac OS X prior to that. What are these things? Is there going to be some apocalyptic global war with spambots that will decimate MacOS X mail readers, leaving barely a few survivors, scarred, crippled and lame, to be sent back in time to try to save the future?

I’m not impressed. And I’m quite sure that porting mutt to Quartz isn’t an option.

Oh well, let’s try *gulp* downloading Thunderbird and reading my email in a web browser.

(Addendum: Thunderbird’s great. Only feature I miss is automatic underlining of misspelt words. It does threading, GPG signing and verifying, it’s pretty, and it supports IMAP reasonably well. It doesn’t even seem too unpleasantly web-based, at least once you actually uncheck the option to say you want to send HTML email. Its handling of word wrapping still isn’t perfect, but it’s better than Mail.app’s.)