Om Malik is taking a poll on his site today about the new features in OS X Leopard. He is asking readers to say which of the new features will compel them to move to Leopard.
Om’s own choice is Apple’s Mail app.
Personally I used Mail for years and loved it but I had to drop it eventually in favor of Thunderbird because its junk mail filters are useless. I kept clicking on the Junk button to try to train it to learn what was junk from what wasn’t but Thunderbird was orders of magnitude better at stopping spam so I had to move away from it.
Reading that there is a new version of Mail in Leopard I quickly checked out its new features but I was disappointed to see no mention of improved junk mail filtering.
I don’t see any compelling reason for me to upgrade then 
Do you?
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I see no reason to upgrade until applications I need start to require it.
As much as I wanted to like Mail.app, I also use Thunderbird, and see no real reason for upgrading to Leopard.
If Mail.app’s junk filter appears to be “untrainable”, you may want to reset the filter via the preferences, which basically brings the filter back to day 1. I had to do this once after upgrading to 10.4, but after a month of training, it now catches 9 out of 10 spams with absolutely no false positives.
Mail.app is useless to me. I tried to use it for about a week until switching back to Thunderbird.
In the last few weeks I’ve switched my personal mail over to gmail. Thunderbird’s spam filter started catching less and less of my spam. Switching over to gmail fixed make my life so much easier. I no longer have to think about spam.
I have to say that I’ve always found Mail.app to be pretty good at catching junk. On the odd occasion it even caught rubbish I didn’t want to read from somebody that I knew.
However, I’m buying a new Mac Mini and I’m purposely holding off for the last few months for Leopard (too tight to buy it separately). I’m really enthused by the Time Machine, Spaces, the new file system view, the piles (collections of items in the dock) that were rumoured for 10.3 but never surfaced and quite a few of the other updates too. Of course I’m a big Mac fan so my views might be a little skewed but I think it’s worth the move.
I use Apple Mail together with MailTags and MailActOn very intensively. But I’ll first have to take a look into the new features until I decide to get Leopard. So far, I found nothing that really drives me to upgrade.
I’d like to clarify that I’m pulling my mail from GMail via POP3. That way, I enjoy GMail’s very good spam filter and its easy to use web interface when I’m on the road as well as the comfort of Mail and MailTags on my MBP.
Ok, so now I can put my stickies in my mail.app in stead of on the desktop. So what?? I don’t get why Apple keep forgetting to do something about this application. Thunderbird has so many much better features, including mailtags. I need mailtags, to be able to group recipients without having to add them to my addressbook first, I need better filtering. I do not need ruled notepaper. Yes, I know I can use MailTags etc, but I think Apple should have prioritized adding better filter and tagging functionality to their app, rather than notes – or both, preferably…
On the petite stuff, I see that I can add an event in iCal directly from a mail. Nice, only in Europe we write dd.mm.yy – unlike in the US. Which means that this feature misinterprets dates, as far as I can see. I could probably change my settings, but that would be confusing in all other situations.
I also use gmail via POP and take advantage of their excellent spam filter.
Why, why, why!? I thought for sure with this update, Apple would add the most basic feature, one that every other email client I’ve ever used has: the ability to set a delay before a mail message is marked as “read.” So basic. I have stuck with Thunderbird for that reason. In mail.app, the moment you highlight a message it’s read. If you delete a message, it instantly marks the one above it as read. Or if you use the arrow keys to scroll down a few messages, viola! You’ve “read” all those that you touched. I know I can turn off preview pane, but that’s not how I read messages. I wish I had the programming skills to write a plugin.
Junk mail filtering in Leopard’s Maill.app, even after a re-set and re-training of the junk mail filtering, SUCKS. It’s absolutely horrid, with many false positives and many many more false negatives. I’ve tried like crazy to train Mail app to block SPAM, to no avail. Thunderbird, and even the now-nearly-defunct Eudora, both provide far superior spam filtering. This is my biggest beef with Mail – but it really drags down the whole app.
How do you turn OFF mail. I don’t want to use it.
Mail.app is useless junk.
It barfs 278 directories on every IMAP account and Mail.apps IMAP support in general sucks compared to Thunderbird.
Too bad that iPhoto does not agree with Thunderbird, even with the iphoto-thunderbird-bridge-kludge.