I’ve switched pretty much exclusively to using Apple’s Mail.app for day to day mail reading. For the most part, it’s a pretty good experience. It definitely handles both Courier and Sun IMAP better than Mozilla (only Courier gotcha is manually setting the INBOX prefix). There are a couple things that really bug me however:
- Not being able to filter by unread, custom flags; this is incredibly useful in Moz/TBird
- No advanced search; pretty lame
- No keyboard shortcuts for lots of things (err, expand all maybe?)
- Doesn’t remember my preferences, for thread expansion, source viewing, etcc.
- Can disable image loading, but can’t disable HTML rendering completely
Some tools that may help:
- zoe – email search engine
- Haystack – ‘universal information client’
- Mail.app plugs and suggestions