As I’ve mentioned here before, I’ve had a lot of trouble finding an email application that I really like. Email is such a huge part of my day, that it’s been frustrating to find such a lack of options out there. Well, I’m giving two new email clients a chance lately — and I would say the jury is still out on both, but both have a yet to annoy me. That’s a pretty good accomplishment for an email client. The first is Mac OS X’s builtin, Cocoa-based Mail.app. The second is the windows shareware mail client, Poco.
Like most of OS X, Mail.app is sharp looking, and has all the basic interface elements I need to manage mail. Text is anti-aliased throughout, which is a mixed blessing. I had trouble reading mail with the default font settings, but once I bumped them up a bit, I’m pretty sure I like the anti-aliasing.
Message display has a nice feature I haven’t seen elsewhere, that allows you customize what headers will be displayed in the message window. Often header info is helpful, but far more often it’s too much to look at. The ability to customize a simplified version is helpful.
The app feels good, and is generally a pleasure to read and write mail with. It handles contacts through OS X’s Address book app, and does auto-completion — but strangely you can’t drag-and-drop a contact from the address book onto a message to do addressing, which I found to be annoying and counter-intuitive. Also, integration isn’t what it could be — for example, you can’t right-click on a message to add a contact to the contact list. On the plus side, the Address Book app supports LDAP server lookup, which is useful in a network environment.
Mail.app lacks in-line spelling checking, something Outlook on Windows also lacks. You can use the spell checker, but it doesn’t put squigglies under words as you type. I hate auto-correction, but I like squigglies.
The rules/filtering capability seems to meet most of my needs, but is not as robust as I’d like. It allows you to do basic header filtering, and you can define headers on which to based the filters, and you can filter on the body — you can do the standard actions, move a message, color it, delete it, forward it, etc. This covers about 75% of my filtering needs. What it doesn’t do, that I think it really needs, is to have multiple criteria in a single rule, or base a rule on something other than a simple string comparison — ie, “message that come in through account xxx”. I’ve also not found any facility for filtering outgoing mail, which can be very handy.
To tell you the truth, when I started writting this, I was going to say positive things about the Mail.app…but the more thought I put into it, the more I realize that I like it only superficially — and largely because I’ve only been using it part-time at home. I would recommend this app to a light duty email user, but I really don’t think I could use it as my primary mail client on a day-to-day basis. It lacks too much.
Which brings me to Poco. Poco is pretty amazing for a $25 piece of shareware. It’s not industrial strength in some ways — it lacks IMAP support, LDAP integration — but, frankly, I’m not using those enough to care right now. It also lacks a good address book, which hurts — because I like to keep all my contact info in one place…but that’s about where my criticism stops so far.
Poco’s interface is skinnable, and customizable in plenty of ways. It has a built-in and simple to use script language for doing incredible levels of complex filtering and custom e-mail actions. It color codes quotation levels in mails, and does in-line spell checking. It has some real nice geek features, like one click access to the raw message in a text editor, editing and adding headers on a per message basis — and variable support in signature files and message templates, so you can use them across multiple accounts with edits. In-line attachment viewing ( yes, this ought to be standard in email apps, but I’ve been using Outlook 2000 for 6 months and I missed it ).
If you’re on Windows, Poco is definitely worth a look. I can’t guarantee I’ll keep using it. Despite all it’s flaws, I have to admit that calendar integration in Outlook is real draw — but if I find a good alternative calendar app, I’ll happily drop Outlook like red hot anvil.
That’s more than I meant to write. I think I’ll stop now. 
