The number of email clients on OS X, much less those that are any good and also accessible, is tragically limited. I'm an advanced email user, so this bothers me a lot.
Of the native clients I have found, MailMate appears the most promising. Sadly, the release schedule is very long, and when I was last in contact with the author he was considering my requests for accessibility, but as of a few releases down the road, they had not been implemented yet. Still, give this a try if you want something a bit more geeky than Mail.app, and it may have got better since I last tried it. Notice, for example, that you can't read message flags. Thunderbird is one of the major reasons I have been toying with going back to Windows as my primary OS on my iMac. It might not be Mozilla's fault that Apple's APIs aren't easy to use in portable code, or it might, but Thunderbird is another one for those who care. It's well-supported, standards-compliant, and with the right add-ins, is basically feature-complete. It's not accessible on the Mac. I use this for list participation in places where etiquette is important. Of course, textmode clients are available, although in practice you'll want to be in a decent textmode environment to use them. You'll probably struggle a bit just using Terminal and VoiceOver, specially with speech only. Gmail sucks. Stop using it. :) Outlook sucks. Definitely don't use that! :) (As an aside, one wonders how it is possible to be "Locked in" to iCloud more than Outlook; Microsoft are extraordinarily slow to implement standards not their own, so that iCloud is the clear winner. Don't get me wrong, Apple aren't saints and have features such as push that are proprietary to themselves, but at least they've got common sense!) You might wonder why you shouldn't use Mail.app. The simple answer is that Apple violate standards, and generate very, very long lines using Q-P encoding instead of format=flowed. The best explanation for this so far is that they are maintaining bug-for-bug compatibility with Outlook. They were doing the right thing up until Mac OS X 10.6.2. This makes me very sad, and is a significant part of the reason I'm inclined back towards Windows--for better or worse, you do get more choice on that platform, and email and netnews are two of the most widely established protocols in existence that I rely on very heavily. As for Gmail users determined to stay on Mail.app, you could try setting up OfflineIMAP. That is rumoured to be a great help with performance, but the setup of OfflineIMAP isn't the easiest thing in the world to do. People wishing to attempt it should express some sort of interest, and we'll take a look at it. As Jason said, one of the easiest and most effective solutions to handle switchovers is purchasing a domain. Most registrars will forward mail for your domain to another mailbox, or else you can use a dedicated provider such as Fastmail or Runbox. These two also offer standard accounts at their domains too, of course, and are all standards-compliant IMAP/SMTP/POP3. Sadly, there was a time when I vowed for a simpler life, and now if I want to switch again it will have to be manually, from iCloud. Still, with forwarding, it isn't nearly as bad as many people seem to think--annoying, sure, but by no means impossible, if you give it long enough. And at least in the case of iCloud, it's all open protocols, so you can choose your email client (my other email client is Alpine, in Linux). Cheers, Sabahattin -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
