I use Gmail for my email, & have since October 2007 when Google announced IMAP support1. During that time, I’ve tried all the (major) email clients on Macs:

  • Apple Mail: Feels large & bulky & heavy to me, & it doesn’t work great with Google on the back end ([Gmail] folders, anyone?).
  • Thunderbird: Not Mac-like enough.
  • Postbox: Slightly more Mac-like, but betrays its Thunderbird roots at every turn. Not a bad alternative, though, to the others.
  • Eudora: My first Mac client, which was great … in the 90s. It got left behind technologically, & now it’s just a fork of Thunderbird.
  • Entourage: No.
  • Outlook: No.
  • Mulberry: Hideously ugly; cross-platform & it shows (told you I tried all the clients!).
  • Sylpheed: Ugh.
  • Claws (formerly Sylpheed-Claws): Double ugh.
  • Sparrow: Pretty nice (& read that in the past tense)! There were a few huge annoyances that really turned me off, like the inability to use a monospace font in plain text emails (what the hell?) & some weird behavior when expanding macros using TextExpander, but it wasn’t bad. But those annoyances made me leave it after a month or so, back into the arms of…
  • Mailplane.

I’ve been very happy with Mailplane over the past several years. Yes, it’s basically a wrapper around Gmail, but it’s a pretty smart wrapper that lets you use common key commands to perform tasks & makes adding attachments very easy. Best of all, it works perfectly with Gmail, which is hardly a surprise, since you’re working directly with Gmail itself. I decided that if I was going to use Gmail, then I shouldn’t abstract the interface away with another desktop client, that instead, I should actually use Gmail. Now that I know Gmail’s key commands (j & k & u & x & d2, for instance), I can fly through my mail. For me, Mailplane has been perfect.

When I upgraded to Mountain Lion, I found out that I had two choices when it came to Mailplane: stick with the current branch I’m on, but upgrade to a version that’s ready for Mountain Lion, or try the beta of the upcoming version 3. I chose the beta, & I’m glad I did. It looks nicer, it seems a bit more logical in its layout, & it has a killer feature: tabs.

The stable, non-beta Mailplane supports multiple email accounts, but you can only view one at a time. If you want to switch from accout Foo to account Bar, you double-click on the Bar listing & wait while the main window reloads to show you the Bar mail. To switch back, double-click on the Foo listing. And so on. This isn’t dreadful, but Mailplane 3 makes it easier & better. Now, every account you define shows up in a tab along the top of the viewport. To switch between accounts, simply click on the tab.

The beta of Mailplane 3 tends to use more RAM than the previous version did, but that’s no surprise, since there are multiple sites open. Other than that, I’ve been happy with Mailplane 3, & it’s been serving well as my main email client. If you’re not scared off by the beta label, & your email is based around Gmail, give the Mailplane 3 beta a whirl.

  • InLink (A local St. Louis company, back when I knew nothing & was very much a newbie)
  • ICON-STL (Now I owned granneman.com, so I’m sure I was hosting that email here, but it was still POP3)
  • OnePine (I believe this is when I started using IMAP, around 2001, although the company itself was a disaster)
  • IMAP Partners (They offered IMAP, but their filtering was horrid)
  • Pair (IMAP, & as UNIXy as they come—want filtering? Procmail, baby!)
  • & then Google

  1. I’ve owned granneman.com since 1997, so switching email from provider to provider hasn’t been a problem. In order, & much remembering, I figured that I’ve used the following to host my email: ↩

  2. I remapped Gmail to use d for Delete instead of the default #, which I never liked. # requires two keys instead of one, it’s not intuitive, & it’s not easy to press. Using d solves all those problems. ↩