(or how I learned to stop worrying and love Apple Mail)

Yesterday saw the release of Thunderbird 3 (UK-specific link), the first major update to Mozilla’s email application in nearly three years. I’ve been a staunch supporter of Firefox, their flagship web browser, since it was first released in 2004. Thunderbird and I, by contrast, have enjoyed only the briefest of relationships (a fling sometime during the summer of 2005), so I thought I’d explore why this is, and why – sadly – I don’t feel at all compelled to give its latest version a try.

In my experience as a long-time medium-to-heavy email user, I’ve found that – somewhat like web browsers – the choice of email client is heavily influenced by one’s environment. Working in a Windows environment as a home user several years ago, I started out with Outlook Express, then graduated to Outlook once I started using calendar, notes and contacts functions. When Thunderbird came out, I switched to that (I can remember the delightfully simple import process – a high point), and was impressed by features like the plugin architecture that made integration with anti-spam and encryption products a cinch. Unfortunately I bought a PocketPC soon afterward, and once I discovered the impossibility of syncing it with Thunderbird, I switched back to Outlook.

More recently as a user in an enterprise environment, the introduction of Exchange meant a mandated use of Outlook. Before Exchange came to the company I was using a mixture of Zimbra webmail and Outlook, but a pattern was beginning to emerge – I was essentially happy with whatever products I happened to have access to. This continued when I bought my first Mac about a year ago; abandoning a Windows PC and Outlook for a MacBook Pro, I switched my POP accounts to IMAP and moved all my mail to Apple Mail. I now use an iPhone 3G when I’m out and about, and the syncing between that and Apple Mail plus the highly capable email functionality of the iPhone itself mean that I’m a pretty satisfied user.

And here’s the thing: when it comes to email clients, alternatives to the standard on your platform of choice are usually pretty hit-and-miss. In most cases there aren’t many alternatives, and where they do exist, they’re often awful. In OS X, if you don’t want to use Apple Mail, you’ve got what – Entourage? Please. Entourage is where notions of good application design go to die. Outlook might take flak on topics such as mailstore integrity (and rightly so) and others, but all in all it’s a great application, especially in enterprise environments. Thunderbird is pretty much the only viable alternative to Outlook or Outlook Express in Windows (discounting ancient history like Lotus Notes, sorry), and it’s just not that different.

And that’s pretty much the core of my argument – it’s the same on the Mac: Thunderbird is great, but it just doesn’t have any differentiators that really grab me in any meaningful way. By and large, any mainstream email client will do 95% of the things I need it to do on a regular basis – and I’d like to think that I represent the majority profile for the email user. My anti-spam/AV is carried out server-side; I now don’t use encryption often enough to move away from manual encryption/decryption with a third-party application; I track a reasonable number of calendar appointments and contacts; and I use notes on occasion. I’m not that special, really. And I can, therefore, be happy with just about any client offering. I could switch entirely to Gmail tomorrow, but I just don’t need to.

Thunderbird’s new features include tabbed view, improved searching, plugin architecture and various other oddments. While I’m sure tabs bring something to the email table, I’m really not sure they’ll have quite the impact they did when they first arrived in web browsers. I rarely have to deal with more than two simultaneously open email messages, and when I do I can manage just fine with them arranged as separate windows on my desktop. Likewise I access up to four mailboxes simultaneously most of the time and can cope quite capably with having them accessible from a sidebar or folder tree. As for searching, Apple Mail’s search isn’t great, but in 99% of cases I can quite happily locate the message I need in a few seconds. Improved search would be nice, but – like the other new features – lacking it really doesn’t feel so bad.

The Register ran an article earlier in the week on Mozilla’s plans to revive a “stagant” email client scene, and this is a word that sums up the situation pretty well. I’ve drawn parallels with web browsers here but they are cursory to say the least – the email client scene bears little resemblance to the exciting skirmishes of the “browser war”, not least because in Internet Explorer we have a product with a huge install base that consistently fails to live up to the agreed expectations of what constitutes a good web browser. Email isn’t really like that, because for most people anything will do. This is as much a product of the nature of email itself rather than the tenets of any particular stock email client – be it Outlook, Windows Mail, Apple Mail, KMail or whatever – email is simple, on the whole, therefore clients are also simple. And it’s going to take significant change in email itself before we start looking around for new clients with revolutionary new features to really rev up our own email experience.