Opinions on ver5?

[Anne-Marie Concepcion]

I've been using Postbox/Mac for 3 years, switched from Eudora (for like 20 years). For the most part I like it. Currently using v4.08.

I tried Postbox v5 for a few days and was a) disappointed that only one feature had been added to Message Filters, and not one I really needed; and b) the interface is yet even more monochrome, and extra "air" means it takes up way more vertical space than before. I do all my computing on a 15" Mac laptop so vertical real estate is at a premium.

I was able to switch back to v4 without too much trouble at all. However, per their support page, they only support v5. (jeez! Though they do still answer questions.) And, I'm generally the kind of person that likes to keep up to date on my essential apps, of which Postbox is one. I rely on it to take care of hundreds of new incoming emails a day to one of 5 diff. accounts. 

I'm curious how other people feel about the upgrade, and if there are some features that I overlooked.

AM

[Tom Nugent]

Yes, I agree that v5 was not a significant upgrade for me.  Most of the new features are not ones I use or care about.  I wish we could make the mail list (middle) pane (when in vertical view layout) able to adjust how tall the boxes are for each message, since there's a lot of white space in there.  

I really wish the notice that is is "checking" email were somewhere more prominent and permanent than the bottom of whatever message you happen to have selected at the moment.  If it takes a while to get the email and I switch elsewhere, then I can lose seeing its progress.

Finally, the smart threading is sometimes a little dumb.  It will group messages with different subject lines but the same list of recipients as the same message thread, even though they're not.

 -- Tom

[Aaron Bousel]

Totally agree about the smart threading. Would love an option to make corrections, e.g. "remove this message from thread", and manage threads. I sometimes end up with messages that have nothing to do with the thread. We could use more options other than simply "on" or "off".

I don't think there's much of a market for desktop email clients anymore. Occasionally I go looking for what's out there and I haven't found anything that looks to be any better than Postbox. I held onto Eudora for a long time (I'm on a PC) but eventually it was clear that it was time to move on.

Aaron

Tom Nugent wrote:

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[David Blatner]

I agree about smart threading being not-very-smart. Similarly, the "favorite contacts" section of the Focus pane is far too restrictive. I work with contacts who have 2 or 3 different email addresses, but those favorites appear to be for a single email address only. That doesn't help.

I also agree about the "checking email" comment… it shouldn't disappear if I click on a message to start reading it.

Here's my biggest annoyance: If I use the Search field to filter the list of messages, then I select one and delete it or file it in a folder, and then Undo… it's gone! It gets un-indexed, I guess, because it disappears from the filtered list, even if I clear the Search field and then search again. I know that sounds obscure, but it happens to me a lot. (I guess I change my mind and press Undo a lot.) :-)

The whole Indexing thing in general is really annoying to me. If Postbox (or my laptop) crashes, one or more folders always become un-indexed and I have to Reindex them (which takes a long time).

Ultimately, I am concerned that the direction of PB5 is toward 'creating more white space" rather than "cram more features in smaller screen real estate." An email client isn't a toy and shouldn't look like one. I want a power tool, not a pretty thing, for the software I use more than almost anything else.

[Christopher]

Us Postbox users, need to make some noise.  I'm using Postbox 4, and from what I've read Postbox 6 should be free for version 4 & 5 users and fix the problems those using version 5 are experiencing. 

Since Postbox support didn't answer a printing question because I didn't upgrade to 5; can I ask another Postbox user on this group ?

[David Blatner]

My thoughts after having used PB5 for the past month: It's a small incremental improvement over PB4. And now that 5.0.10 was released, I'm not having as many bugs as I did.

I've grown to like some of the features, such as emoji support, color icons, message filters that go across all accounts, and the message size indicator. 

(For example, sometimes I'll hit reply and see that my reply is 5 MB and it reminds me to go delete the embedded image that was in the message I'm replying to… some people embed images like that instead of attaching thing.)

Anyway, I'm back to being generally pleased with Postbox. But I'm also annoyed that they're going backward in other ways… the fact that Config Editor is now blank unless you know what to type is really frustrating.

And I'm frustrated that they don't seem to be adding significant new mail organization features. For example, "Favorite Contacts" is great but if one contact has 3 or 4 different email addresses they email from, there's no way to group them. The Advanced Find dialog box works, but it takes far too many clicks and time to "dial in" what I'm looking for.

I hope they're reading this, and listening to their customers! :-)

--david b.