[Macworld]

Post your comments for Postbox 2.1 here

[griffman]

FYI, it's on sale now (for who knows how long) for $30; I'm trying the 30-day demo to see if it can replace Mail, which keeps annoying me with certain limitations.

-rob.

[fonnesbeck]

Postbox is promising, but there are some poor design decisions that make it frustrating to use regularly. The most important flaw is in the search behavior: when you enter a search term, the search stays in effect until you manually delete the term. This may not sound like much of an issue, but when testing the software, I cannot count the number of times that I had seemingly lost a particular message that I *knew* was in a particular folder, only to find that there was a search term active from hours ago. The search does not go away when you move around from folder to folder, moreover, there is no obvious message to let you know that what you are seeing is being filtered.

The message inspector sounds great, but in practice I did not use it much. The picture of the recipient in the inspector is pretty pointless, as I (and I suspect most of you) do not have photos for the vast majority of people to whom you send email messages.

The use of "ToDo" to specify flagged messages is perplexing -- these arent todo items on a list, these are messages that have been flagged for one reason or another. Seems like a case of being different for the sake of being different.

Finally, from an interface standpoint, Postbox like most other Mozilla-based apps is pretty ugly on the Mac, with some UI components looking like native OSX, and others looking very cross-platform Mozilla. Postbox would benefit greatly by being ported to WebKit.

I'm sure some people will find Postbox compelling, and I'm glad there is finally some competition in the desktop email space, but I would not recommend Postbox for heavy email users.

[daveedvdv]

I've used up the 30-day trail and I agree it's a terrific mail reader (the best I've used so far). I used it as my primary mail reader on my MBA during that time (while still using Apple Mail on my iMac, where some e-mails get moved out of IMAP folders). I'll almost certainly switch to Postbox on both my iMac and MBA.

I disagree with "fonnesbeck" that it's "pretty ugly on the Mac": I'm usually quite sensitive to such issues, and while it's not perfect, it's at least as good as Apple's own Mail in that area.

One pro of note: It deals with IMAP (and Google's pseudo-IMAP) noticeably more efficiently than Apple's Mail (and also lacks some of Apple's quirky behavior when it comes to naming IMAP folders). That is actually the primary reason why I'm planning a move to PostBox (followed closely by the v+type keyboard-based filing UI).

One con of note: It's got a very limited AppleScript dictionary (I have a script for Apple's Mail that turns an e-mail into an entry in our defect database, and I've only been able to make an imperfect version of it for Postbox using both UI Scripting and a Thunderbird plugin).

[MacPro]

@fonnesbeck:

I have to disagree with most of your assessment. The Search feature in Postbox is better than most, if not all, other mail clients -- faster, more flexible. When in a search, Postbox puts a big striped bar on your mailboxes warning that you are seeing a filtered set of messages. I don't see how you can say Postbox it doesn't let you know you're seeing a filtered list. Dismissing the search doesn't even require mousing -- Escape dismisses the search and put you back to an unfiltered list.

The photo feature in the inspector window might be useless to you since you don't have photos, but to those who do it's a nice feature. You can also pull photos from Facebook to populate that, if you want. If you don't use the feature, though, it doesn't detract in any way from the functionality of Postbox.

Being an Inbox Zero kind of guy, I don't use the ToDo feature. But the accusation of "being different for the sake of being different" seems like you're just being critical for the sake of being critical. I'm sure many people find this a useful way of flagging messages that they want to stay at the top of their message list so they don't forget to act on them.

Postbox is Mozilla-based, sure, but the Postbox team have actually made quite a few interface changes to the Mac application to make it more attractive and compliant with Mac UI guidelines.

In its early days I switched back and forth between Mail and Postbox (as I have between Mail and way too many other email clients). I've now settled on Postbox and find it has many features that are great for power users, but also works just fine for people who are not.

[Johnson]

Apple needs to buy this company and incorporate the Postbox improvements into Apple Mail. It's silly to have a close competitor to Apple Mail that lacks a basic capability like native Exchange compatibility.

[snej]

@Johnson — unfortunately software doesn't work that way. It's not like play-doh where you can take a lump of blue and a lump of yellow and mush them together to make green. It's more like having two cars, one of which has a better suspension than the other, and trying to take the suspension out of one car and attach it to the other.

In some cases you can acquire technology and transplant features from it, but in this case I'd be really doubtful, since Postbox is based on Thunderbird, which is all cross-platform C++ code with a UI layer built with XUL. This is absolutely nothing like the architecture of Mail, which is of course a native Cocoa app written in Objective-C.

My feeling is that if Apple really felt it was a priority to add those features to Mail, they would have had the Mail team add them (hiring more engineers if necessary.) But if the situation is still anything like it was when I left Apple in 2007, the Mac OS division has been greatly weakened by the high-level focus on iOS.

[pamwe]

If one has multiple emails in the drafts folder how can I send them all at
once without sending them separately? This function does not seem to be available.

Forwarding messages with attachments does not include the attachments.

Please any help would be appreciated

[MarkDadgar]

I would switch to Postbox in a heartbeat if not for its mid-90s Windows style of attachment management.

C'mon, guys, I've been using in-line attachments since NeXT's Mail.app in 1992. I ain't goin' back now.

But fix that and my 40 bucks is yours.

[MarkDadgar]

MarkDadgar, on 22 December 2010 - 02:40 PM, said:

I would switch to Postbox in a heartbeat if not for its mid-90s Windows style of attachment management.

C'mon, guys, I've been using in-line attachments since NeXT's Mail.app in 1992. I ain't goin' back now.

But fix that and my 40 bucks is yours.

Ok, never mind. I see that they added a preference for inline attachments recently.

Hello, Postbox and Goodbye, $40!

- Mark

[grhakl]

I must be a troglodyte. I can't imagine anything better than Eudora and will never move away until OSX breaks it. Can anyone compare it with Postbox please?

[Mystakill]

The incompatibility with standard TBird extensions makes Postbox a hard-sell for me. There are too many unsupported extensions. Of the few listed on the Postbox extensions page, not all of them keep their extensions compatible with updated versions of Postbox (like this current version 2.1; Virtual Identity was initially incompatible, but was updated, and ThunderBrowse, which has yet to be updated)

I realize that they've extended TBird functionality, but it would have been nice if they'd put more effort into extension compatibility.

[Mystakill]

@grhakl:

Isn't Eudora also based on Thunderbird as of several years ago?

[TeeGate]

fonnesbeck, on 22 December 2010 - 07:04 AM, said:

Postbox is promising, but there are some poor design decisions that make it frustrating to use regularly. The most important flaw is in the search behavior: when you enter a search term, the search stays in effect until you manually delete the term. This may not sound like much of an issue, but when testing the software, I cannot count the number of times that I had seemingly lost a particular message that I *knew* was in a particular folder, only to find that there was a search term active from hours ago. The search does not go away when you move around from folder to folder, moreover, there is no obvious message to let you know that what you are seeing is being filtered.

I agree completely. I don't know how anyone could say otherwise. It is the most frustrating thing that I have ever had to deal with when using an email program.


Guy