One of the few bugs in Mac OS X 10.4 that affects me is that the default email program (imaginatively named “Mail”), which had worked just dandy for me in previous versions of OS X has suddenly decided to stall and hang up when displaying email messages. Sometimes, when I receive a new email, the display window will simply show this

Sometimes, it will last for just a second or two. Sometimes it will take over a minute or two for Mail to display the mesage.

Very frustrating.

In order to rule out a problem with our mail server, I checked my mail in MS Entourage. All was fine. But I don’t like Entourage. I don’t like the way the fonts are displayed. I do not like the rumors of mailbox crashes.

I downloaded Thunderbird. It downloaded and displayed the messages perfectly. But Thunderbird, like most open-source projects, has moments of pure ugliness. This is mostly fixable with themes, but it’s still ugly. The only exception for both Firefox and Thunderbird is the absolutely stunning Charamel theme. I’m using it now.

But there are things about Thunderbird that I don’t much like. I want to re-organize the message list pane so that the sender is listed first, then the subject. So far, I haven’t seen a way to do this. [EDIT: Todd pointed out to me that you can, in fact, rearrange these panes. Turns out I just didn’t hold and drag, um, hard enough, or something, when I tried to drag them around the first time.

And so I kept hunting. I even downloaded Eudora, which I’d not used since OS 8.5 through OS 9, but, as I’ve always felt about Eudora, it’s just strange. Windows everywhere. Navigation is maddening. I’d forgotten about that.

Nisus Email? Retired without so much as a peep from Nisus and all trace of its existence erased from the Nisus site as if it were a bad decision on par with getting drunk and having “Hello, my name is…” tattooed on your forehead. OOPS! It turns out that a Google search for it turns up a super-secret download. Alas. It doesn’t seem to do IMAP.

MailSmith? No IMAP support. Does anyone not use IMAP?! Dear god why not?!

And so I’m back to Thunderbird, which I suppose I’ll use until either Apple sorts out the bugs in Mail or Thunderbird gets access to the OS X system-wide address book. Or until Thunderbird gets inline spell checking, which is likely not going to happen.

Harumph.

The problem, really, isn’t so much that Mail is buggy or that I don’t like Thunderbird. It’s that Apple has done such a fine job of creating a suite of applications that operate seamlessly together that it’s very frustrating when one of them is weak. The result is that users like me wind up hopping back and forth between applications that kind of work like I want (or like they should) but not really, or between applications that don’t connect to one another, and so the settings on one of my computers isn’t the same as on others. And so Thunderbird doesn’t add new people to my OS X address book, which means that they don’t sync up in my Palm or get synced to my other computers via iSync.

This, of course, is the critical weakness in Apple’s “iApp” strategy of integration. If a crucial application fails to work well, the strategy doesn’t work.

I would imagine I’m not alone here.

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