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Seeking Nerdvana The Road from Windows - Online email
Seeking Nerdvana The Road from Windows - Online email | The Road from Windows - Online email |
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| Written by Adam Turner | |
| Thursday, 10 January 2008 | |
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Page 3 of 3 As I've said recently, I'm leaning towards buying a Mac Book running Leopard so there's also the option of a .Mac account. Of course you don't need to own a Mac to have a .Mac account, but to be honest I wouldn't have thought of it were I not considering buying a Mac Book.The .Mac interface looks exactly like the Apple Mail desktop app, so the preview pane is under the email list and there's no option to switch to a three column layout. Unfortunately Apple doesn't offer a desktop notifier app but there's a few third-party widgets that will do that job. The .Mac account naturally plays nicely with the Apple Mail desktop app, although I was astounded to discover that Apple Mail doesn't have pop-up notifications. The free MailAppitizer plug-in rectified this. The biggest disappointment with the .Mac account is you can't set filtering rules in the webmail interface. Filters can be created on the desktop in Apple Mail, but they won't be run until you check your email using Apple Mail - which is useless if you're trying to forgo desktop apps and just use webmail. While .Mac seems to have a lot of potential, the lack of online filters is certainly a deal breaker. For now it looks like I'll be switching to a Leopard Mac Book and running a desktop mail client to download from FastMail. Disappointingly Thunderbird 1.5's Sync on Arrival plugin didn't seem to work properly on the Leopard Mac Book Pro I tested it on, but Apple Mail seemed fine with my FastMail account using IMAP. After all my ranting about using multi-platform apps it looks like I'm getting sucked into Mac world with Apple Mail and iCal - but I'm after the best tools for the job so I can't let stubbornness or ideology get in the way. At least it's easier to import and export data from these apps than from Microsoft apps, so I'm not locking myself in - as I was in Windows world. I haven't given up on my dream of an app-less desktop, so I'll keep an eye on Fastmail, Yahoo! and .Mac's webmail offerings in the hope that one day I'll find something that gets a tick in every box. PREVIOUS POST: The Road from Windows - Time for change {moscomment}
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