What's the best Email software to use on Mac

I’ve been happily using Tiger’s Mail.app and never had a crash.
The POP settings are very standard, though it does have support for using secure settings, which throw some people off.

What I’d recommend first is that you first run all of the updaters and then use Disk Utility to “Repair Permissions” for the whole drive and see if that cures the crashes.

If that didn’t work, try backing up the file _{/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist to a safe place, delete it from the original location, back up your mail folders (}/Library/Mail) and restart mail and type in the settings again. (Do all of this at your own risk, of course.)

Good luck.
Jim

Thanks Jim i’ll give it a try
Simon

I agree with Jim. I’ve been very happy with Mail. I’m also wondering if you might be using a slightly older version or if your current version is harboring an older bug… Jim’s suggestion of dumping the preference file could very well take care of that.

BTW – I use several POP accounts from different domains and have no problems at all.

One more thing, my wife (a designer and fellow Mac geek) used to use Entourage but has recently switched back to Mail. She doesn’t love Mail but does prefer it to Entourage.

Good luck !!

OK, let me expand this question a bit,since Simon has basically gotten his question answered. At the moment I am using yahoo for general mail, and alot spam goes there too; I use gmail for business and a few other thingsbecause frankly I really like the setup, I think it works best, and I dont get any spam; and I use “neomail” for my domain, and the mail I receive there is forwarded to yahoo at the moment, though I will probably change that to gmail.

So that means I have three windows open sometimes. The reason I started with these web-based mails is that I could always log onto my accounts even when travelling without my computer. So, can I somehow have all these mail services linked to my Mac Mail so that i just have to open one account? Also, do I need a Mac account to run the Mac Mail thingy? I mean I dont use .mac and dont want to. Thanks.

Jon,
I have beenusing Apple Mail in association with my gmail account for over a year now and have not encountered any problems. If you want to set up Apple Mail, Mozilla’s Thunderbird, or Microsoft Outlook, to automatically check your email without having to long onto the site the instructions to do so are on your gmail main page. When you login at the top right corner you will see your address, settings, help and sign out. Click on settings, then Forwarding and POP. First slect the box that says Enable POP, and then at the bottom of that page you will see a link called Configuration Instructions, follow that link to select the Email App you want insturctions for, and there you have it. It lists about 7 different email apps you can use. I also beleive that Yahoo mail can be setup for POP delivery as well, and you can have both accounts checked by the same app., and then when you are away from your computer you can still log onto the website and check the email as you have been doing.

I really like using Apple Mail, because it automatically checks my in boxes every 5 minutes, so if I’m away from my computer the messages are right there when I get back, and when I’m at my computer I can reply to a client’s email within 5 minutes of them sending it, which they really seem to like. If you have any questions about what I just posted feel free to email or PM me.

Brett

I just wrote a long reply and somehow it hasn’t been posted?
Thanks to Bret and Jon for your replies
To clarify my question a bit more, like jon i travel around a lot so access my email often in an internet cafe. When i got my G4 powerbook last year i opted for the .mac account and the forwarded my domain email to my .mac account. This works fine on principle but i find Mail behaves strangely with certain actions amd maybe i have set it up wrong. But when i open it up and it checks my mail it often freezes ‘cos it’s syncing with my .mac account. Maybe this is my router and Thailands poor ASDL.So i had to keep “forcing quit program” to close it and reopen it and start again. The bigger problem was sendijng email attachments last week i sent a series of Images to B& W magazine for next months issue which was an urgent request -only to find out the following day only a few files had arrived even though my sent box confirmed all were sent. I got round this by “logging on” to my .mac account via Safari and sending them this way. It got me wondering, if my mac.com emails were being spam blocked and not getting throught to the reciever. So i then tried to load in my domain email servers POPD and SMTP protocols into the Mail program and it all goes wrong. I coped exactly what my server specified but no joy. I will contact my domain service provider Netcom when i’m back in the Uk to check that i’m keying the right information. Bringing up Jon’s point if i could find a way of using my domain POP3 mail and mac.com mail on the same email program that allowed me to choose my “reply to address” i’d be very happy!

Simon

I have been using gmail – web based only for 2 years now – seems great I will send you an invite. Anything valuable you can always forward to another computer based pop server.

This thread came alive again after quite a while, so i guess I might as well update my situation. After much dithering I was not able to figure out how to get round the Mac Mail account signup thingy, and I just forgot about the issue for a while. I have almost abandoned my Yahoo account and I have my domain mail forwarded to Gmail and I check it all there. However, recently, for some reason I still do not understand, my Gmail acct would be inaccessible, particularly, though not always, during the business hours. If I accessed it before, say 9am (and I usually take care of email when I get up around 7) all was fine, but after that hour it would remain inaccessible for long periods, with intermittent moments when I could log on. I talked to Verizon (my DSL provider), Gmail, and also Netgear, whose wireless router I use to connect to the laptop anywhere in the apartment. Sometimes I noticed that I could access Gmail on the desktop but not on my laptop, hence my query to Netgear. Verizon swore there was no problem with their servers; Gmail advised me to clear the cache and history and cookies and try to log on after, and that didnt really work. Netgear sent me instructions on how to change a few things in order to permit gmail to load more easily; apparently some sites, like yahoo, do not always download over the wireless system without some extra tweaking. However, I never did input the changes because suddenly gmail is loading again easily. In the meantime, in order to solve the problem I set up Entourage to access my gmail acct and that worked damn well. So I use that as a backup now, just in case. Also, Simon, I believe that Entourage does in fact allow you to choose your reply to address. And I have the thing rigged so that my name and affiliation (jon/dark horse images—yeah I know it sounds abit hokey, but I like it) appear on the recipient’s menu as such.

Jon, can do all of that with mail as well – I have 4 separate email accounts all part of my scheduled send and receive, all work totally fine – and yes, very easy to select which account to send from, with individual personal info, with a drop down box when you compose mail (actually, too easy if you follow me!). They are all my own domains with standard pop settings etc – never had a need for ‘public’ webmail accounts like Hotmail, Yahoo or the like – I just use my own webmail – through SquirelMail – to get to my accounts if I’m on the road and san computer…...Alternatively, you could, like Simon, forward to say .Mac and read webmail from there (SO many advantages to .Mac, you may as well have for $90 or whatever it is).............Simon, I’ll sort you out when you are back in the ‘Kok ! :-) S

Thanks Jon, Richard and Steve.
A while back i contacted my domain server and managed to fix a bug on my account which had logged over 4000+ emails and hadn’t deleted them. Once this was sorted i was able to set up Mac Mail and formward my domain address mail to my mac Mail account and choose which address to “reply from”.

Rich and Steve see you back in BKK in a couple of weeks…..