Mail 1.2

We have really liked OS X's Mail application from the beginning despite its limitations and quirks. So much so that we have continuously used the 10.0 and 10.1 versions on our desktop Mac, a Cube, where our mail is "permanently" stored on a IMAP server. In January we began using Mail 1.1 on our PowerBook G4 but we switched to Microsoft Entourage X in April. Why? Because we primarily use POP mail accounts on our PowerBook and Mail occasionally lost and munged some of our email, email with html and images sometimes took forever to resolve which kept us from doing anything else with Mail, a rule filter could not have multiple conditions and actions which too severely limited filtering and, lastly, because Mail lacked decent contacts and calendaring applications.

Setting up Mail 1.2 was a snap. It did take right at an hour and a half on our 800 MHz PowerBook G4 to import all of our email messages from Entourage because we carry a huge number of unarchived but backed up messages, over 15,000. If you have a lot of messages be sure to set Mail up when you have enough time for the automated import feature to finish. We only had to add a few filters as rules, mostly ones to color the backgrounds of various classes of important messages. We love being able to color the backgrounds of messages with rules to set critically important email messages apart from the others in the list window. The other rules sort some incoming mail into special mailboxes.

Mailboxes are organized differently in Mail 1.2's sidebar. Previously, mailboxes were organized by separate account. With Mail 1.2 there are common In, Out, Drafts, Sent and Trash mail boxes with sub-boxes under each for each account that can be displayed or not using the clickable arrowhead. Additionally created mailboxes show up as folders under a general heading of "On My Mac". Imported mailboxes end up as separate folders in an "Imported" folder under On My Mac. We like this new organization very much.

In 10.2, everything appears to have changed for the better based on almost 2 weeks experience. So far we have not lost any email nor have any of our mailboxes become corrupt. It's a short test but we have our fingers crossed. Emails laden with html and images take no longer to resolve than with M$ Entourage and, best of all, Mail is not locked from further use while waiting for such email to appear. Each Rule can now have multiple conditions and multiple actions for excellent filtering of email messages. The upcoming iCal application will soon free us completely from our need for Entourage.

Another major improvement is that Mail now connects with our Windows NT LDAP address servers. We could never get previous versions of Mail to search our LDAP server but Mail 1.2 does. This is probably due to improved Windows networking in Jaguar rather than a change in Mail 1.2. It was certainly a pleasant surprise for us in any case.

The new Junk mail filtering system works marvelously. We used 21 filters in Entourage to get about 65 per cent of the spam that we received at our main email address. And we get a lot of spam, hundreds a day, such that it is 70-80 per cent of our mail at that address. Right out of the box with no other rules or training, Mail's Junk filter identified 95 per cent of our spam and misidentified only a few spam-like notifications that we actually signed up to receive. After 3 days in training, Mail's Junk filter was nearly perfect and no longer misidentified the wanted spam-like messages. So we set it to automatic and it has been doing a superb job since.

Our only dislike is the vertical lines marking received text in message replies or forwards. Their implementation looks really cool but the lines make editing the content a little more difficult than with the standard arrows.

The main feature that we would like to see added to Mail is a clickable direct link to forwards of or replies to messages. It is nice to have messages marked with replied or forwarded icons in Mail but finding the replies and forwards would be so much easier with a clickable dynamic link. This is the only feature in Entourage that we will miss.

Mail 1.2 is now as excellent functionally as it has been visually and simple to use. We believe that we have switched back to Mail permanently.