Been messing around with this today and it's very, very impressive. I don't know if it'll beat out Mail.app as my primary e-mail client but it's way better than Thunderbird (even better than Thunderbird 3). - Akiva Moskovitz from Bookmarklet

hmm... - edythe

@Akiva: In all fairness, Thunderbird's been dead in the water for a while. Gmail + Gcal have killed everything except Outlook in the enterprise - LANjackal

The 'lightning fast search' - is it all locally cached to enable that, or does it do server IMAP searches? - Sparky

LANjackal, I routinely loathe Gmail. - Akiva Moskovitz

Sparky, I imagine it's a local index. - Akiva Moskovitz

I'm checking it out. I like the interface, however "It's not Gmail". For you thats a good thing, but not for me. It threads conversations, but doesn't hide the repeated stuff. Too much scrolling! - Sparky

Also: I'm not sure what they are going for with topics. Is it supposed to be tags? - Sparky

For me, the less an e-mail client acts like Gmail, the better it is. - Akiva Moskovitz

But what's the point of threading conversations if you don't hide the repeated bits? It's just putting emails in a long strip then. I don't see value in that. - Sparky

Well, if people knew how to properly quote e-mail rather than lazily quoting it all, it wouldn't be an issue. - Akiva Moskovitz

People shouldn't do that - machines should. Replying to email should be as quick as possible - hit a single key to start replying, type a response, and then no more than 2 keystrokes to send. Lazy quoting isn't a problem for Gmail or Outlook because they both do you the service of client-side hiding all the lazy quotes. - Sparky

You're wrong. People should put more thought into their replies: they should select the quotes they want and they respond to them. - Akiva Moskovitz

FWIW, I find Gmail's model horrifically disturbing if you're not using Gmail. It promotes TOFU and is generally a huge pain in the ass to anyone who choses not to drink the kool-aid. mutt(1) and vi(1) for lyph3 plz. - matthew john ernisse

I love Gmail, but agree with Akiva about quoting. Proper quoting can't be done by a machine. - Roger Benningfield

"proper" quoting sucks for context though. If you trim quotes and then we add a 3rd person to the thread how can they catch up other than manually forwarding them the 20 responses so far? A big part of what I do for a living is emailing and I can't imagine trying to jump into issues mid-stream if I couldn't read through the mile of responses when I first get it. From that point on I rely on the client to only show me net-new responses. - Sparky

bleh, forward the thread as attachments, explode them into a folder and read them unfettered by all the cluttery nonsense. see also writing a synopsis. And that's about as much as I'm going to say about inline vs TOFU. This need not become holy war territory. - matthew john ernisse

Forwarding the thread as attachments is a pain in the ass. Email shouldn't get in the way of productivity, rather be a quick and transparent conduit of information. Email is like IM that's indexed for eternity. - Sparky

Sparkles, have you seen the Wave video? - joey

Sparky, and trying to make heads or tails of a 20-level-deep quote pile is also a pain in the ass. - Akiva Moskovitz

for this very reason I am super exited for wave. though a lot of the drawbacks of e-mail are MUA issues, not protocol issues. - matthew john ernisse

Joey - I'm wet for wave. Akiva - trying to make heads or tails of only the last snip of a 20-level--deep quote pile is impossible. - Sparky

I thought you might be. - joey

Which is why you can send them the thread as an attachment. - Akiva Moskovitz

If you send a 'properly' quoted thread as an attachment you A) have to keep doing that as a thread balloons and more people get added and B) the person has to click through 20 seperate attachments and figure out what order they go in. I'd rather have a single long strip I can scroll to the bottom of and work my way up. ALSO ALSO: the .eml format is not widely standardized, so you can't forward emails as attachments to people using other email clients. - Sparky

If you send a 'properly' quoted thread as an attachment you A) have to keep doing that as a thread balloons and more people get added and B) the person has to click through 20 seperate attachments and figure out what order they go in. I'd rather have a single long strip I can scroll to the bottom of and work my way up. ALSO ALSO: the .eml format is not widely standardized, so you can't forward emails as attachments to people using other email clients. - Sparky

ALSO - how the heck do you "properly" quote on a mobile device? - Sparky

That would be a short-coming of the mobile device's mail client. - Akiva Moskovitz

Name a single mobile device that makes selective quoting even possible (barring holding the delete key for obscene amounts of time). - Sparky

That would be a short-coming of the mobile device's mail client. - Akiva Moskovitz

That, or you have an unrealistic expectation that the world does something by hand that is entirely unneeded. I'd say that the majority of all email sent in the world is sent from Outlook or Gmail (the enterprise sends a LOT of mail) and both of those clients handle client side display of lazy quoting very well, and every mobile client in the world enforces lazy quoting. - Sparky

And IE is the dominant browser in the market place yet it encourages all sorts of really bad behavior in both developers and in user expectations. Doesn't make it right. - Akiva Moskovitz

Fair point. I still think it's a large amount of effort to quote something for a 3 word reply. - Sparky

Jason - that is actually the one thing that still has me playing with Postbox. Search results as a tab is slick. - Sparky

mernisse: I don't think most people care about TOFU so most clients don't care if they promote it or not. Honestly the only time I ever heard it mentioned (including 4 years at one of the nerdiest schools in the country) was at Frontier :P - Benjamin Golub

Haha - google for 'tofu mail' and the results are so all over the board. - Sparky

bolub: Which is fine by me :) I'm a big fan of using technology in the way that best suits you. Hence running Linux on a MacBook and barely ever replying to e-mail on my BlackBerry and my staunch use of inline replies. There is a fairly big rift between TOFU and inline even in large development communities such as lkml or {ubuntu,debian}-devel. - matthew john ernisse

Akiva - one thing about your IE analogy. While IE sucks and everyone in the know hates it developers still have to code friendly to IE6 otherwise a large portion of their audience can't see it. Full quoting is inelegant but at least it always works. - Sparky

That's still no excuse for it. You might as well encourage writing really inelegant code as long as it works. - Akiva Moskovitz

You can write very elegant code - just make sure you write it twice: once for IE6 and once for everything else. - Sparky

checking out Postbox e-mail client. strangely interesting. http://postbox-inc.com/ - Bill Carroll

I've been following this conversation through FF notification to Gmail. I've definitely have had a few sips of the Gmail "koolaide"... :-) - Kevin Whalen from email

this looks very good - Michael

Jason, I never used Pegasus very much because, to me, it seemed like an inferior Mulberry (the best IMAP client to ever have existed). - Akiva Moskovitz

... TOFU? - cecily

another way of saying top-posting, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... It stands for 'Text over Fullquote Under' - matthew john ernisse

This looks really promising, but I don't get enough mail to make me want to go back to using a desktop client. - cecily

Looks good, but at this point it would take *true* Gmail syncing (favorites, filters, labels, etc.) for me to return to a desktop client. Gmail is just far too capable as it is. - LANjackal

I am again so very, very glad I don't use Gmail. - Akiva Moskovitz

definitely liking it so far! - holly

Gonna have to check this out... - Michael McKean

People who use Thunderbird have nothing to lose and everything to gain by switching to Postbox. It's missing a few niceties such as being able to click on a date and make an iCal entry linking back to that e-mail, something I do constantly with Mail.app; it's also not automatically turning an http:// text into a link. Hopefully these things will be addressed in future versions (along with making the conversation mode a little more intelligent as Sparky as pointed out). - Akiva Moskovitz

Installed it as a backup in case of Gmail failure. Now IMAPing my all my mail to my HDD. Good suggestion, Akiva. - LANjackal

Just installed it and am checking it out. Thanks for the tip. - amygeek

I was really impressed with it until I realized I just don't want to give up that much RAM to an email client. Back to Gmail for me. - Jason Wehmhoener

I have been using postbox since the get-go. mail was constantly having issues with smtp, and I wanted a fresh start. I like the tab views and to-do integration, they added quick-look recently and it has been pretty rock solid overall. I highly recommend it - joey

I won't be able to use it as my primary e-mail client until they integrate with iCal. I need to be able to click a date in an e-mail and add it as an iCal event linking back to the e-mail. I do that constantly. - Akiva Moskovitz

Can't wait to give Postbox a whirl on my Mac. Mail.app sucks so hard it's just dying to be replaced. - Adam Morris

I tried this app a bit yesterday on a Windows machine, and I really liked how it easily integrated with my Google Apps account, even threading conversations. I seemed to miss some functionality that is apparent in the OS X version though, but that wasn't _very_ needed. Seemed quite speedy, and the default settings were nice and not obnoxious (e.g. didn't save IMAP e-mail for offline use). - Niklas Pivic

Thanks for the mini review ^Niklas :) - Keshav Khera

Keshav: I'm glad to have helped, if I have. :-) - Niklas Pivic