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Using Mozilla's own code, Postbox rivals Thunderbird for alternative desktop e-mail clients. Or at least, it wants to. Make no mistake, Postbox introduces some innovations that Mozilla could learn from. Much as Songbird changes Firefox's tune for audiophiles, Postbox takes desktop e-mail hard toward Web 2.0, with fast links to upload contacts to Facebook and pictures to Picasa.
Click on an e-mail, and the preview pane not only shows the text, but extracts all links, images, other attachments, and contacts into a Compose Sidebar for easy management. From there, you can upload to Twitter, FriendFeed, MySpace, Delicious, and Google. Postbox is also obsessed with tabs, so that each new mail can open traditionally or in a tab of its own. Searches get their own tabs, too. Postbox will ask you to import e-mail, contacts, and other messaging data from Thunderbird, Outlook, Google, and Yahoo when it starts. Two other innovations are worth highlighting: you can globally extract attachments, links, images, or contacts into a single tab, and there's a remix of Thunderbird's Labels feature. Called Topics, it automatically searches across folders for messages with the same tag. This can't be done without extra effort in Thunderbird.
Postbox gained Thunderbird's extensibility in beta 13, but it's currently limited. There's heavy customization is limited, although Postbox does now have it's own slightly-buggy version of Thunderbird's Lightning calendar plug-in. There's also support for the Provider for Google Calendar plug-in. All the add-on talk may be a major interest for some, or much ado about nothing, but the beta won't be free for much longer: Postbox plans to go premium in the fall of 2009.
Publisher's Description
From Postbox:
Postbox helps you make the most of your email, offering powerful new ways to find, use, and view email messages and content, organize your work life, and get stuff done. Postbox works behind the scenes to catalog everything in your email. We mean everything: every bit of text, every contact, address and link. Every picture, document and attachment. It's all in the catalog and it's all searchable.
What's new in this version:
- Improved Performance - Postbox is now faster and more responsive--take it for a test drive!
- Languages - Postbox now supports community-translated language packs, including German, French, Spanish (Spain), English (British), Italian, Dutch, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, and Swedish, with more on the way.
- New Setup Wizard - When creating a new mail account, Postbox will automatically determine your connection settings for you. All you need to know is your user nam... See all new features
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All versions:
3.8 starsout of 13 votes
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Current version:
4.0 starsout of 2 votes
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My rating:
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Results 1-2 of 2
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"Sadly, Postbox 1.1 is not quite what I was hopin..."
Version: Postbox 1.1
Summary
...fo
This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.
I use two different mail clients because I get enormous volumes of e-mail every day (about 5000 for work and probably 500 a day for personal/other endeavors.
I used to use Eudora on my Mac. I loved that program despite its flaws. It was the fastest mail client with a GUI I've ever used and had absolutely no problems with all the e-mail I get and archive (I keep much of my mail back to 1994.)
When it went open source (became a Thunderbird pet project) I had to give it up and I was very sad about that.
I went looking for another mail client that was as fast and that had a reasonable GUI, paid OR free.
I moved my personal e-mail over to Apple Mail and have been quite happy with it (it isn't perfect, but it really does work well and have a good UI especially in Snow Leopard). However, I didn't want to mix my personal and work e-mail anymore and needed some other solution.
I tried all of the available paid e-mail programs for the Mac and none of them worked well for my needs.
I ended up with Thunderbird 2.0 for my work e-mail not because it was the best choice (the UI absolutely stinks) but because none of the paid options were any better and so I decided to stick with free, all other things being equal.
I recently heard about Postbox from a friend and thought, hey, I'd love to have a Mac e-mail client that works well and has a decent UI, so I downloaded v1.1 and told it to import my Thunderbird e-mail and it went to work.
It wasn't all that long before everything was imported. Unfortunately there seems to be a bug after import because the folders were all listed in Postbox, but the right side of the screen where the mail should be was blank (dark grey, no UI elements)/ Not knowing the program I fussed with it for a bit before figuring this had to be a bug.
I quit and reopened Postbox and there was all my mail. Great. It imported everything from Thunderbird, mail, address box, filters, everything! Yay.
My initial impression was the program was pretty nice. I like the threading and the UI is something of an improvement over Thunderbird. I like the auto threading of e-mail conversations. Unfortunately, it is Thunderbird at its core and a lot of the bad UI choices remain in Postbox. I can forgive that since this is a new product. It will take time to build something truly great.
Since the developer is currently offering 25% off anything you buy, I came "this close" to purchasing Postbox. With lifetime upgrades for my family the total cost came to just under $65. Again, not a problem for a product under active development with lifetime upgrades.
However, at the last second, something told me to try the product some more before committing myself.
I'm glad I did because it was only after some use that I noticed flaws that make the product not worth the money to me.
1) v1.1 is still slow. I tried opening the trash on my work e-mail (containing a couple thousand messages from today). I got the old classic Mac OS "watch" icon (meaning, I'm working on this, please wait) so I waited... and waited and waited. I have an early March 2009 Mac Pro with the fastest processor option and 12 GB of RAM running Snow Leopard. There's no excuse for poor performance. I went back to Thunderbird 2 and opened the trash and it came up immediately. So I quit Postbox and restarted and it still took a very, very long time to open the trash folder. Other folders with lots of messages took a similarly long time to open.
2) There are too many bugs. I tried emptying the trash and the process failed to do anything (the mail remained in the trash, no warnings, no indication of the program still working on my request). I tried opening an address book contact and the display was garbled the first time. I had to go to something else and go back to that contact to get the display to work properly.
3) Despite the improved UI, it's still not a true Mac program. I'm guessing the developer is using mostly Thunderbirds non-standard UI elements or has written the program in Carbon, because things just don't work like they should on a Mac. On top of that there are still a number of Thunderbird's ill-conceived UI choices left in the program (take, for example the bizarre little pop-up sheet that warns you that Postbox isn't the default client. Checkboxes and odd scrolling elements, exactly the same as Thunderbird. Additionally, not all of Postbox's configuration items are in the Preferences like they should be. Some are under tools (as they are in Thunderbird). There's more but this post is already rather long.
So I decided to take a look at Thunderbird 3.0RC2 that was just released. I discovered that Thunderbird 3 has several of the UI and feature improvements of Postbox 1.1, not all, but many. Plus, Thunderbird 3 looks somewhat more like a real Mac program than v2 (still not great, but closer). Considering that Thunderbird is completely free and much, much faster than Postbox right now I just can't see spending the money.
Here's the thing... I desperately WANT to find another e-mail program that has a great UI, blazing speed and handles heavy e-mail loads for the Mac. I'd gladly pay $129 for it if there was such a thing.
It might be that some day Postbox will be everything I need and more and if so, I'll be happy to pay immediately and switch, but I just cannot recommend this program for serious e-mail use.
If you get a normal volume of e-mail and you're big into social media then Postbox is a great choice and I encourage you to take a look.
Unfortunately, I'll be sticking with Thunderbird for some time to come, it seems. -
"Great build"
Version: Postbox 1.1
Summary
This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.
1.1 is a great upgrade to Postbox. I'd already chosen Postbox as my email client after a long hunt for a Eudora replacement. This version adds tremendous speed improvements and other upgrades. The tabbed browsing is fantastic (keep several mailboxes open at the same time), and the sidebar of attachments, links, images (with instant search for recent messages from the same sender) is great, and the Conversation View makes reading a long thread easy. The learning spam filter could be stronger, but that's one of the very few even remotely weak points. Oh, that and iPhoto doesn't recognize Postbox as an email app for one-click mailing. Well worth the price, and the developer offers an purchase option that includes upgrades for life.
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