Thank you Brian, Matthew, and others for your most helpful comments to On the IMAP Operating Table.
I have managed to solve almost all of the gross problems standing in the way of switching to Mail.app as my primary mail client. Goodbye Eudora, you've been my most faithful companion for a decade. Actually, I've gone to considerable lengths to move messages to the server in a way I can still use Eudora when I want to. Thank you, IMAP. But Eudora now is strictly a secondary program.
Because email is my most heavily used app, I am now trying to customize Mail.app and learn its nuances so I can work at full productivity.
Glitches I am working on, aware of , or just complaining about:
A whole bunch of messages in the server folder Sent Messages are showing with a date sent of today (as well as date received, but we've been over that), which is not when they were really sent. I need to identify the set of messages, delete them and re-export them from Eudora to the IMAP server.
There's no way short of Applescript to copy (as opposed to move) a message to another folder as far as I can see. I used this feature heavily in Eudora to create a copy of every non-spam, non-mailing message I received into a single Log folder. That way I could move messages out of In into other folders to help keep me organized, but still search a single folder to find messages.
Junk mail processing doesn't always happen automatically. I don't know why. I have to manually execute a rule to move junk mail to the junk folder. I am keeping it in training mode because it's still making quite a few mistakes, mostly false negatives. Not sure when to turn off training.
Mail periodically (and unexpectedly) decides it needs to index mail or process the colors, whatever that means. Having the activity views window open reveals a lot about what it does, but it does interrupt my work flow and is not done so seamlessly, jumping the display around in the mailbox to cause me to lose context. It could be a lot smoother.
I miss the "Forward To" command of Eudora, though good auto-completion of addresses goes a long way.
Posted by mitch@osafoundation.org at September 27, 2003 03:22 PMI switch to IMAP to be able to deal with my mail both on my laptop and on my desktop.
As a secondary benefit, I was able to give many different email clients a whirl. The feeling of freedom was enormous. I came back to mail.app though. ;)
Posted by: Daniel Von Fange at September 27, 2003 06:00 PM
To copy a message in Mail.app option click the message or selection of messages, the little envelope with circular arrow that represents the messages for drag and drop should also have a plus sign in the lower left corner.
Daniel has a good suggestion above, it's probably worth trying out a few different clients also Entourage, PowerMail and a Mozilla based one are all worth a try and now you have your email on the IMAP server it's much easier to do.
Posted by: Matthew at September 27, 2003 06:53 PM
You said: "I used this feature heavily in Eudora to create a copy of every non-spam, non-mailing message I received into a single Log folder. That way I could move messages out of In into other folders to help keep me organized, but still search a single folder to find messages."
Opera's mail client- M2, that I mentioned previously keeps all mails in a single folder - Received - by default. At the same time messages also appear in other... um "access points". An access point isn't exactly a folder but a feature designed to make it easy to find your mails.
I wrote about it here http://tinyurl.com/oury
Posted by: Manu Sharma at September 28, 2003 09:12 AM
I've been using mail.app as my primary mail client for over a year now, and upgraded to the 10.2 version with junk mail filtering about three months ago. I find it just-about-adequate as a mail client, except that it's extemely slow rendering html mails (on a G3 iBook), but the junk mail filtering is basically useless: far too many false negatives, and it doesn't seem to learn from my manual classifications at all effectively - continues to miss messages that are very similar to ones I have already flagged as junk many times over. I intend to install Spambayes on my server instead - not an option that is open to most people.
Posted by: Alan Little at September 29, 2003 06:59 AM
I think your log folder is huge. Having all (pertinent) messages available for searching is important to the way I work. I frequently include my deleted folder in my searches, which serves as part of my message history. This work for me since all junk mail goes a special folder (for training the bayesian filters.) I long for a “shredder” command for messages that aren’t junk but I don’t want around system bounces, mail list stuff… (Yes, shift-delete works, but it’s a fairly obscure windows concept with pesky confirmation dialogs.)
On my wish list are “bots” or “agents” than can scan for interesting matches in my message history (the “my info agora”), building links into other content. Phone#’s, Names, Places, key words that match projects/documents, date/times, event names. Sort of a personal google meets better smart tags.
Posted by: Daniel Klaussen at September 29, 2003 07:02 AM
Have any of you tried Zoe, found at http://zoe.nu/
Posted by: P.M. at October 16, 2003 03:08 PM
I probably don't understand exactly what your needs are, but you don't need to copy every message into a single mailbox in order to search through all your mail. You always have the option of searching in either all your mailboxes, or in whatever subset of them you've currently selected in the mailboxes slide panel.
Posted by: Tom Pollard at October 24, 2003 05:53 PM