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Comment by hkuo | Hacker News Reader

Why no love for Apple Mail? The only thing Apple Mail needed was the ability to have the preview pane on the right, which was made possible by this developer who created WideMail: http://widemailplugin.com/. No affiliation, and his site design is terrible, but the plugin works to a tee. I would share a screenshot, but it's a bit too much work to blur out and black out any sensitive information, which would pretty much result in the entire image being blurred out. But here's a basic screenshot I grabbed from the web: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1517499/widemail-thumb.jpg

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Nah, even with the preview pane, it's still a world away in terms of presenting a beautiful, uncluttered interface, and just overall feel (stuff like supporting gmail shortcuts, synching reliably and effortlessly with gmail, understanding gmail's notion of "archive", just the right amount of preview in messages, &c).

Apple Mail was also, in my experience, really flaky. Sparrow has been pretty darn solid since a couple of betas ago.

For me it's Apple Mail's lack of gmail-style "conversations". I just can't go back to conventional threading behavior.

What exactly is it in Gmail's Conversations that you prefer over Apple Mail's Organize by Thread feature?

Both sides of the conversation. Mail.app's thread feature only shows emails you have received, without weaving in the emails you have sent.

I'll just expand on what YooLi said.

You can see both sides of the conversation, and I prefer how a conversation is treated as a single entity. If I archive a conversation, all messages in that conversation are archived. And if a new reply to the conversation comes in, the entire conversation gets pushed back to my inbox.

Apple Mail's Organize by Thread feature is retarded. It considers any messages that have the same subject to be in the same thread. Gmail's Conversations identify the actual threads/conversations instead.

Exactly. I don't see the point of using a Gmail-specific client that removes the only Gmail feature no other client implements.

I used to use LetterBox (does the same thing) but I still much prefer Sparrow — it's light, more modern, prettier, under more noticeably-active development… to list just a few reasons.

For me it’s Mail’s lack of native support for Gmail labels. It can organize emails into folders easily, but as far as I can tell, only one at a time. That makes me worried that when I sync with Gmail, my multiple labels for each email would be lost.

So I don't have to reply individually to all replies, I'm convinced to give Sparrow a go. I've never felt at a loss in Apple Mail, but I'm always willing to give a new product the chance to win me over.

I have 10+ Gmail accounts loaded into Apple Mail, I feel like I grow old launching Mail.app vs Sparrow. I won't go back.

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