Four years ago, Macworld published a great article on email clients, which outlined the pros and cons of the available software and the best options for advanced email users: http://www.macworld.com/article/39971/2004/10/emailclients.html

It has been four years since that email came out and new clients have since been developed. I'm grappling w/ the central question of that article: which email client is the best? I presently have Mailsmith, but it just crashed and I lost all of my files. It appears this has to do more w/ my hard drive than Mailsmith itself. But I’m now reconsidering what kind of email client would be best, esp. since I’m about to upgrade to a new powerbook and Leopard. The most important emails features for me include:

-Searching (critically important)
-Filtering (I had about 12 mailboxes for one account)
-Stability (crashing and losing email is disastrous)
-Security (wish I could improve it, but it seems elusive)
-Capacity (for storing lots of email)

Powermail looks like it has amazing search tools, but I’ve read that it’s lacking good security.

Thunderbird has a new feature that enables one to look at the viewing history, just like a web browser. That looks appealing, but I don’t know much more about it beyond that feature (and I've heard negative things about it).

I’ve heard positive things about the Mailsmith’s beta, but have advised not to use it for important email since it’s still being beta tested. It’s unfortunate since they’ve been testing it for almost two years now.

I have no idea which email client offers the best security. I have PGP but haven’t even really used it since it’s hard to find others who have it and use it. I wish I could find a better solution for security, esp. when I travel.

Any thoughts? Suggestions?

Still searching for that perfect Mac email client, indeed...

Thanks!