Using Postbox

I’ve decided to give Postbox a try as my default e-mail client. I love Mail.app’s simplicity, but it has some quirks and I feel I could do better.

Here’s what I like so far:

  • A sleek interface for tagging (called topics)
  • Quick browsing of attachments in a folder or from a contact
  • Archive message immediately with ‘a’
  • Gmail-style conversation view
  • Pretty good and quick search
  • Plug-in potential, although there’s not much available yet.

Here’s what I dislike so far:

  • No global folders, i.e. one inbox, trash, sent and drafts for all accounts
  • Topics don’t seem to be IMAP-portable, so you have to apply tags both at home and at work
  • Message rules can not filter on content, only on message headers
  • The message composer is bulky
  • Integration with Mac OS X is not as good as Mail.app
  • It’s Mozilla-based, not native.

I’m undecided on:

  • Tabbed interface. I’m not used to it, I don’t need it and I don’t use it. But it might grow on me.
  • Editing messages: not sure why I’d want to do that.
  • Facebook and Twitter integration

Postbox does not come for free, while Mail.app and Thunderbird do. So it should really impress be before I switch. I remain unconvinced but hopeful for now.

“Your request to not receive promotional emails about your subscription has been received and will be processed within the next 10 working days.”
FT.com customer service: 10 working days to unsubscribe from your mailing list? That’s crazy fast! They must be using some kind of “computer”. Amazing…

E-mail can be hard to find, no?

For my formal request for a bachelor’s in History I needed to hand in my thesis via e-mail. I asked to make sure if I needed to include anything special with that, such as a subject line prefix, so they would be able to find it later on. The friendly lady on the phone told me that was unnecessary.

Two days later when I came into their office to hand over all other paperwork I had to wait fifteen minutes before they had found my thesis from their grand central inbox. “We get a lot of e-mail every day, you know. It’s can be hard to keep track of it all.” No shit.