Postbox - 1.0 beta 15

I use two different mail clients because I get enormous volumes of e-mail every day (about 5000 for work and probably 500 a day for personal/other endeavors.

I used to use Eudora on my Mac. I loved that program despite its flaws. It was the fastest mail client with a GUI I've ever used and had absolutely no problems with all the e-mail I get and archive (I keep much of my mail back to 1994.)

When it went open source (became a Thunderbird pet project) I had to give it up and I was very sad about that.

I went looking for another mail client that was as fast and that had a reasonable GUI, paid OR free.

I moved my personal e-mail over to Apple Mail and have been quite happy with it (it isn't perfect, but it really does work well and have a good UI especially in Snow Leopard). However, I didn't want to mix my personal and work e-mail anymore and needed some other solution.

I tried all of the available paid e-mail programs for the Mac and none of them worked well for my needs.

I ended up with Thunderbird 2.0 for my work e-mail not because it was the best choice (the UI absolutely stinks) but because none of the paid options were any better and so I decided to stick with free, all other things being equal.

I recently heard about Postbox from a friend and thought, hey, I'd love to have a Mac e-mail client that works well and has a decent UI, so I downloaded v1.1 and told it to import my Thunderbird e-mail and it went to work.

It wasn't all that long before everything was imported. Unfortunately there seems to be a bug after import because the folders were all listed in Postbox, but the right side of the screen where the mail should be was blank (dark grey, no UI elements)/ Not knowing the program I fussed with it for a bit before figuring this had to be a bug.

I quit and reopened Postbox and there was all my mail. Great. It imported everything from Thunderbird, mail, address box, filters, everything! Yay.

My initial impression was the program was pretty nice. I like the threading and the UI is something of an improvement over Thunderbird. I like the auto threading of e-mail conversations. Unfortunately, it is Thunderbird at its core and a lot of the bad UI choices remain in Postbox. I can forgive that since this is a new product. It will take time to build something truly great.

Since the developer is currently offering 25% off anything you buy, I came "this close" to purchasing Postbox. With lifetime upgrades for my family the total cost came to just under $65. Again, not a problem for a product under active development with lifetime upgrades.

However, at the last second, something told me to try the product some more before committing myself.

I'm glad I did because it was only after some use that I noticed flaws that make the product not worth the money to me.

1) v1.1 is still slow. I tried opening the trash on my work e-mail (containing a couple thousand messages from today). I got the old classic Mac OS "watch" icon (meaning, I'm working on this, please wait) so I waited... and waited and waited. I have an early March 2009 Mac Pro with the fastest processor option and 12 GB of RAM running Snow Leopard. There's no excuse for poor performance. I went back to Thunderbird 2 and opened the trash and it came up immediately. So I quit Postbox and restarted and it still took a very, very long time to open the trash folder. Other folders with lots of messages took a similarly long time to open.

2) There are too many bugs. I tried emptying the trash and the process failed to do anything (the mail remained in the trash, no warnings, no indication of the program still working on my request). I tried opening an address book contact and the display was garbled the first time. I had to go to something else and go back to that contact to get the display to work properly.

3) Despite the improved UI, it's still not a true Mac program. I'm guessing the developer is using mostly Thunderbirds non-standard UI elements or has written the program in Carbon, because things just don't work like they should on a Mac. On top of that there are still a number of Thunderbird's ill-conceived UI choices left in the program (take, for example the bizarre little pop-up sheet that warns you that Postbox isn't the default client. Checkboxes and odd scrolling elements, exactly the same as Thunderbird. Additionally, not all of Postbox's configuration items are in the Preferences like they should be. Some are under tools (as they are in Thunderbird). There's more but this post is already rather long.

So I decided to take a look at Thunderbird 3.0RC2 that was just released. I discovered that Thunderbird 3 has several of the UI and feature improvements of Postbox 1.1, not all, but many. Plus, Thunderbird 3 looks somewhat more like a real Mac program than v2 (still not great, but closer). Considering that Thunderbird is completely free and much, much faster than Postbox right now I just can't see spending the money.

Here's the thing... I desperately WANT to find another e-mail program that has a great UI, blazing speed and handles heavy e-mail loads for the Mac. I'd gladly pay $129 for it if there was such a thing.

It might be that some day Postbox will be everything I need and more and if so, I'll be happy to pay immediately and switch, but I just cannot recommend this program for serious e-mail use.

If you get a normal volume of e-mail and you're big into social media then Postbox is a great choice and I encourage you to take a look.

Unfortunately, I'll be sticking with Thunderbird for some time to come, it seems.

The developers really have a great idea here. The biggest problem is that the app does not appear to be built atop Cocoa, or at least they are not using the proper Cocoa text fields for Spelling and Grammar checking. I have a TREMENDOUS number of custom spellings in my dictionary due to my industry and unfortunately I will not be porting all of these spellings back over. It feels as though they are using Mozilla as a foundation for that and that is extremely unfortunate in this case.

If you hear this guys, please strongly reconsider using Cocoa fields for all text editing for deeper Mac OS X integration and much happier customers. I would probably be willing to be a slight amount of money for this app if they fixed that and cleaned up the interface slightly with Cocoa elements.