I started using the beta version of Sparrow as my default Mail client in November, and have not once been tempted to switch back to Apple Mail. I’ve been in regular touch with Dominique Leca, one of Sparrow’s developers, over the past three months or so while it was still in beta, and made a number of suggestions, all of which were carefully reviewed and several of which were implemented in the final version. And ever since beautifully-designed applications like Twitter for Mac and Weet have become available as desktop Twitter clients, Apple Mail has seemed correspondingly more dated and bloated, and I have yearned for something leaner and, ideally, designed from scratch for Gmail. It does still, however, have a lot of features I don’t need and while not unhappy with it, I was always open to the idea of a superlightweight email client specifically targeted at Google Mail users. It’s a powerful client based on open standards for practically any email setup and works reasonably well with Google Mail, although it needs a lot of tweaking to run optimally §. While it’s possible to set up an email server and only access it online, using a web browser (and a surprising number of people never go further than this, probably because they are unclear about the distinction between server and client), in practice most people will gain from using a client application to access their email server and act as an interface: this brings benefits such as more intuitive interface, storage of a local copy of part or all of your emails, offline access, and better integration with your other desktop applications.Īpple Mail isn’t a gross package of proprietary bloat such as Microsoft’s Outlook (which I used before I switched to Mac and has become available for Mac OS X in the recently-released Office 2011) and the now-defunct Entourage. Google have worked hard to make Google Apps for your domain converge with Gmail, to the point that they are now effectively interchangeable. Four years later, I’m still using it and it’s still the best email solution by far. In 2006, I switched my email provider to Google Apps, which combines the power of Gmail with the flexibility of using your own domain name. Perhaps the best-known of these Mac mail clients is Mailplane, actually not so much a fully-fledged application as a frame within which you can access Gmail (it only works with Gmail, which I’ll call Gmail Classic in this post, and Google Apps, which allows you to map your own domainname to your Google Mail account) from your desktop.īecause of the way email works, you need to host it on a server accessible from the Internet: in practice, this means you have to choose an email provider on whose servers your email reside §. None have ever come close to tempting me into using them as my default mail application. I’ve never had any major issues with Apple Mail, which I’ve been using pretty much continuously in combination with my initial Exchange server and my current Google Apps setup, ever since I switched in 2003 but as I’m of a curious disposition, I have tried out a number of the few alternatives that occasionally became available. The main ones are Mailplane and Postbox, both of which I’ve tried but not found any compelling reason to prefer to Apple Mail. So the launch of Sparrow Mail § is actually a major event, since only a few competitors to Apple Mail are available. Sparrow Mail, which I am certain will soon establish itself as the best email client for the Mac, launches today on the Mac App Store.Ĭreating an email client from scratch is very difficult: this explains more than anything else why so few genuinely new email clients are available for the Mac, outside of Apple Mail which comes bundled in with OS X.
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