Update on Mail Saga

After a week’s worth of effort I’m coming to conclude that Thunderbird is still the best thing on the Mac, which quite frankly is sad.  The Mac pioneered Multimeda, and yet any serious attempt to use Mail as a multimedia UI is met with an obstinate user interface.  I’m not saying it’s impossible, just difficult to use.

On the other hand, I’ve found a very uncomfortable yet okay approach to dealing with Thunderbird’s breakage: have the compose font set to be “Variable Width”.  I can’t stand the font, but it is what it is, and it doesn’t change in the middle of a paragraph.

A few people have asked me why I even bother with a mail UI, as opposed to Web Mail interfaces.  The answer is two-fold:

  • I want access to at least some of my mail off-line.
  • For work I would have to go through any number whoops essentially to establish a WebMail interface that I like that ran under a web server on my laptop.  It’s not an outrageous idea, but it is a lot of work, and it’s a lot of work I shouldn’t have to do.

And so I will get by with Thunderbird, but I do think, as one of my other friends pointed out, that there’s a potential business opportunity for someone who actually WANTS to send multimedia inline HTML.

It’s also time to make a donation to the Mozilla Foundation.  I paid absolutely nothing for the use of Thunderbird and Firefox, and both are still the best things going, in spite of their warts, and let’s face it: I’m a pretty demanding customer.  Are you?