After your computer crashes for the second time of the day and you reboot, the last thing you want to be greeted with when starting the Mail.app is this:

This is not the first time Mail.app forgets who I am and where my e-mail is stored. Fortunately I solely use IMAP and thus all messages are safely stored and backed up on a server somewhere. Unfortunately, for Mail.app, this was the last time I go through the agonizing pain of setting it up the way I want just to have to redo it in a couple of weeks. I don’t know if it is the amount of messages in my mail accounts or something else, but it keeps happening.

The first impulse was to download Thunderbird, but I have never liked it on a Mac. There is something I can’t really pinpoint … something of a bad usage feeling. I recently read on LifeHacker.com that Woz organizes all his e-mail with Eudora and so I actually considered it for a brief moment, but no, it is to much 1998 over it.

As I have done several times before on this matter, I turned to Google. A search for “mail clients for mac” resulted in 78,300,000 hits, most of which I have probably read before, but this time, an article caught my attention – Postbox: An Alternative Email Client For Mac | MakeUseOf.com.

Postbox is a new kind of e-mail animal that builds on Mozilla technology and adds several interesting features like “topics” (where conversations can be tagged), integration with social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Flickr (to mention a few), working indexing and a smashing user interface. Another feature I really like is archive. I just press ‘a’ and the selected message goes to an archive folder of my choice. Inbox zero in no time, and no need for expensive addons like Mail Act-On (for Mail.app).

Even if this is not a open/libre program (and it probably will have a price tag later on) I’m diving in head first and don’t look back. After using the “Beta 11” version for a couple of hours I must say that I’m happy so far. A good and sleek e-mail app is a crucial part of my work day and so far Postbox seems to handle it well. I will give an update when I have used it for a while. In the meantime, download the beta and play with it yourself at http://postbox-inc.com/ (available for both Mac and Windows, no Linux version yet).