Of GyazMail and Sway
Hi, I'm a Mail.app user, but the widescreen-pane aspect of Gyaz looks really neat,However I noticed scrolling through my messages is rather laggy. Is this something you've noticed as well?
Nicholas P.
I've gotten a ton of mail over the last while about GyazMail, and I've kind of avoided it because I wasn't really sure how to handle it. I use it on OS X, however I rarely recommend it anymore.
I'll get to that in a moment, but to get to your question, yeah, it's always been a little laggy when browsing large amounts of messages, but amusingly enough it still used to be faster than Mail.app...
Something seems to be exacerbating it a bit in 10.4, but table views and such are just one of the achilles heels when it comes to performance with Cocoa.
I.E., when I looked at it, classes like NSDictionary were very, very slow compared to a standard C array. Most times if you're going to have to work with them a lot, you're faced with a choice:
- Go the Cocoa API route, using things like NSDictionary or NSArray to store your data, and take its goodness with its slowness. However, if this kills your app's performance...
- Drop down to C arrays to get the speed, but possibly introduce a bunch of stuff you're going to then have to maintain.
Now there are things like bindings, which gives a programmer a way to map their data to a table row without a bunch of glue code. They're great in the sense that fewer lines of glue code is going to mean faster development with fewer bugs, but slow things down even further. Chances are you're really noticing the slowdown when you try to scroll a mail folder full of several thousand messages and things start to get "jumpy", which is primarily the fault of NSTableView.
I.E., when I look at my inbox, there are 7 fields, or columns, for every row. Every time you try to scroll, ever single cell in each row has to be drawn, and the APIs for those aren't exactly light. It's just very slow if you try to do it in Cocoa, with your only realistic option -- that I'm aware of -- being to subclass NSView and write your own, eschewing NSTableView altogether.
My impression is that the author stays away from this type of thing as much as possible, sticking completely to the functionality provided by the Cocoa APIs. This is good in the sense that it means GyazMail is very light on the bugs, but bad in the sense that GyazMail doesn't even highlight quoted text in a different color while you're composing an email.
The idea of people seeing something in my Dock and tracking it down is both cool and a little wiggy. It's cool in the sense that if being in my Dock means your mindshare may go up, the chances of my being showered with swag goes way up, and my ass can always use more hickeys. It's wiggy because it doesn't allow me to give any context for why I'm using something or why its there, and while I wouldn't use anything unless I believed it to be solid: One size does not fit all.
I.E., it's not a secret I use MarsEdit to do many of my DrunkenBlog posts. It works for me, and the things it doesn't do aren't things that affect me. I don't care that it doesn't do much in terms of images, because I use an external app along with a script to upload them. I don't care that it doesn't do WYSIWYG typing, because I generally just add the XHTML formatting while I'm typing anyways.
However, while I use MarsEdit and dig it, I also really dig Ecto and think it's quality, and know a bunch of users do care about some of the things I mentioned. I'm probably overly paranoid about people just adopting things rather than going with what really works for them, so while it's flattering if you're turned onto something you see on the site, do put things through their paces.
I originally started using GyazMail because every single email client for OS X sucked, and sucked hard. It's just one of those areas that grates on my brain, because I'm a bottom-up person: Make sure the most basic things kick ass, and then add the icing. Email on OS X doesn't kick ass.
At the time, Apple's Mail.app couldn't even reliably send multiple attachments to Windows users. People would argue about whether Apple was doing it wrong or the Windows clients were, but the fact of the matter was that it just didn't work. Also until 10.3, you couldn't even delete a Mail server via the GUI; you'd have to find the preference file and edit it out manually. It just so wasn't a polished application, and was achingly slow.
Entourage had always been my mainstay on the Mac, and out of all the clients, I still prefer its interface and features. Yeah, it barely knows what threading is, but it's still a sweet app with an achilles heel: It's database. I was losing email to this thing, people were getting messages they weren't supposed to, and Microsoft MVP's were telling me proper maintenance included rebuilding the database at least once a week, preferably twice.
That's a fucking joke.
So I went shopping for a client for OS X that:
- Did what it said on the box.
- Looked decent.
- Had decent performance.
- Was reliable. I was willing to swallow a lot of things, if it meant I didn't have to worry about losing anything.
I ended up finding GyazMail, whose claim to fame was that it stored each message individually on the drive in an RFC format, and just built indexes from them to speed things up a bit. If something went wonky with the indexes, I could just blow them away and have them rebuild -- but knew that mail would still be there on the hard drive.
You just have no idea how paranoid Entourage had made me -- I sent lots of attachments and lots of mail, and I was just sick of the idea of having to babysit my email client or risk having things get chewed up. There's a tendency here to bash Microsoft, and I'll admit to being pissed at it.
The other side of the coin is that Office is one hell of a beast, and I'm still amazed it's really been cost-effective for them to bother porting it to OS X at all. In my heart of hearts, part of me has always wondered if aspects were subsidized...
It's worth noting that I don't base my expectations of an email client based upon what's available on OS X. I.E., I upgraded someone to Mail.app in Panther not that long ago, and they were blown away by threading -- "It's so incredibly useful to keep track of the conversation!", and well, it was old news to me.
On Windows, I generally use Eudora or Outlook or Thunderbird, but primarily Thunderbird now. Properly setup and used, Outlook is an outstanding email client for Windows, as is Eudora, as is Thunderbird. On Linux, I use Evolution, and the worst thing I've generally heard said about it is "Blah, It's just like Outlook." If it didn't exist, I'd be perfectly happy to use Thunderbird, but I am seriously smitten by Evolution.
I have a serious penchant for wide-screen clients, and at this stage, that basically leaves Thunderbird and Entourage for OS X, and Thunderbird just isn't quite there yet, although when it is, it's probably what I'll be using. I spent hours trying to get Evolution running in OS X, and just came to the conclusion that while it's theoretically possible -- I've heard a few people were able to do it -- it's just not a realistic option for OS X just yet.
I'd like to be clear about something when it comes to GyazMail: It does what it says on the box. This is actually a really big deal nowadays.
In the several years that I've used GyazMail, it's crashed on it's on somewhere between two and three times, and most of those have been since it started using WebKit to display HTML (Previously, there was no HTML support). It's an extremely solid app, and I've never had it go wonky on me that I can recall.
Everything it says it does works, and while some things could always use improvement (like rules, searching, etc.) it Just Works™ and I don't lose sleep over it being fragile. Like a friend, if I feel I can trust an app when it counts, I'm willing to cut it a lot of slack on what it does and doesn't do. The problem for me is that on the same box, GyazMail made promises about the future, and this is where things start getting out of whack.
To start, a few notes:
- GyazMail costs $18
- It was originally developed -- and continues to be -- by someone in Japan who created it because he was unhappy with the Japanese support in Mail.app and such. There is someone here in America who handles website and tech support for English users, passing stuff back and forth.
There are a lot of things GyazMail didn't do when I looked at it, like IMAP support or spam filtering. It's strictly a POP3 client, but several years ago when I purchased it, IMAP and spam support was promised as forthcoming. I was really just making the transition to IMAP myself, so I could wait, and like I said, I was willing to cut a promising app a ton of slack because I trusted its foundation.
In the last version it finally got spam filtering, by means of SpamSieve integration. Now, SpamSieve is incredibly high quality, and its hard to get better spam filtering than what it offers on the client side, and everyone email client should allow the option of using it. However, this is the only option for GyazMail, which means you're looking at paying over $40 for an email client that can't do IMAP.
I get why the author went this way, and I get that it makes for a very effective solution, but it makes the value of the whole so out of whack there are just very few people I can recommend it to. And really, there's been little movement on the app since I bought it, so I can't expect IMAP support to show up "any day now".
Years ago, I futzed with the .nib to turn it into a widescreen email client and sent it to them, and ended up being told indirectly that modifying software was against its TOS. This was a little stupid, and in the last update they did finally add widescreen support... by essentially just flipping the bit on the .nib, so it looks like this...
The above is just a shot I did back in the original post, but also included this mockup which gave an idea of how to actually make it really useful...
Their solution was the former, which is really just a low-quality hack, and you can't even switch between widescreen and normal views without having your columns go all wonky. It's not a quality implementation, especially after you've used any of its competition that has the feature, or even just seen how someone like NetNewsWire implements it.
To be honest, I've never heard from the author again, despite sending in a ton of bug reports and -- ages ago -- wishlist stuff. It's a great, solid app, it just barely progresses and improves and I got tired of waiting for it to mature and fulfill its promises.
Not all that long ago, I decided I needed to start hunting for a replacement again. I basically use different apps for different accounts -- I.E., blog stuff goes to GyazMail on my Mac, with other accounts going to other clients. Gyazmail got a bit of a reprieve here, because:
- Nothing knows GyazMail exists, which meant I was going to have to spend time exporting each folder out to an .mbox, or wrapping each message folder into an .mbox, or checking out its AppleScript support. This meant my inconvenience had to outweigh the time it would take to actually get the data out.
- Weirdly enough, Mail.app can't even deal with the format for the .mbox GyazMail puts out for some reason, which means a casual user is probably going to have to first import it into something like ThunderBird and then Mail.app. This was just weird.
- Thunderbird has come a ways in OS X, and while it still isn't ideal or what it is on other platforms, it has rudimentary widescreen support and handles IMAP very well.
I'd transitioned all my other accounts to IMAP, and had decided on Thunderbird. Even in 10.4, Mail.app is just so incredibly wonky when it comes to IMAP support when I tested it there was no way I wanted to deal with it day to day. Everyone always tries to blame Mail.app's wonkiness on the server instead of the client, but there's just no way.
I was diving into Thunderbird headfirst when Apple started suing people left and right.
This was a problem, because there was the very real possibility that I was going to be subpoenaed for what I knew about the Tiger lawsuits. I'd dealt with that mentally and was ready for it, and then I saw what they were doing with the leak lawsuits against PowerPage and AppleInsider and such, and had to rethink things a bit. In those, Apple was serving them to hand over any information they had, and they're still duking it out.
The EFF stepped in to fight it, because it's a situation where the EFF is invaluable. Apple tried to end-run around them and their motion, and subpoenaed their ISP instead, telling them to hand over all the email from their sites. The EFF was able to get them to stop this, and to wait on the verdict for whether they could have access to the information at all, but I had to consider that Apple wasn't playing nice here and I couldn't count on a subpoena coming my way and whether my ISP would just hand over everything on the server.
Basically, POP3 got a big reprieve when it came to site email because while it wasn't a perfect solution whatsoever, it was just safer to suck it off frequently than to leave it on the server. That way, Apple at least had to deal with me with what they tried and I'd have a choice in the matter.
Yes, I'm sure I seem overly paranoid, but it pays to be paranoid with the things I saw going on at the time, and it's just the type of thing I was having to deal with and take into account. There is still one person being sued over Tiger, so who knows.
Now, I primarily try to do things via encrypted IM, because it's a lot easier to get people setup with it than it is to explain GPG keys and such, so I'll probably be looking at moving clients again soon.
I could write volumes on the concept of Sway, because it's still something I'm having to mentally deal with. I.E., I've always joked about my 13 loyal readers, and for what I do, you really just sort of have to pretend you're writing to a small group people or you could well wig out.
Since this isn't Diaries of a drunkenbatman, and I'm well aware I'm overly obsessed with this, I won't delve too deeply into it. Lets just say that while I appreciate the trust some have in me -- not necessarily to be right all the time but just to be straight with them -- I'm immensely flattered but a little wigged at the same time.
Obviously I haven't completely formulated my thoughts when it comes to this, but I guess what I'm saying is download GyazMail, and if it rubs you the right way by all means use it, but use it because it rubs you the right way and not because it's what I'm using. I know, I know, I'm sure none of you would ever do that, but I feel as though I have to say it anyways.
Posted by drunkenbatmanSeptember 03, 2005, at 11:43 PM
Comments (28)
Posted by: drunkenbatman at September 4, 2005 12:02 AM
Gah, I sound like a stalker...
I could do worse than a androgenous OS X hacker.
But anywho, I use Eudora. I love it, it does what I need it to do, it handles large amounts of email (857,200 messages to date) without crashing, and it sucks the least of all the other OS X email clients.
Mad respect for Eudora, and I respect it on OS X to be something of value. Unfortunately, I just have a psychological aversion to it after using the Windows client and then seeing how long in the tooth it is on OS X.
Posted by: Aldo at September 4, 2005 12:36 AM
I encourage you to give Entourage 2004 a try, if you haven't already. Besides improving the database code, there is also a background application that periodically checks your database for any tell-tale problems, just in case.
As for the MVPs, where were you getting this information? I've been hanging out on the Microsoft Entourage news server for a couple years now, and I've never read an MVP recommend weekly rebuilds. That's insane, and completely unnecessary.
WRT paranoia, keep in mind that Entourage can now easily export all of your files to standard formats, so database-free backups are easy. With a little Applescripting you can probably automate them as well.
Posted by: Kevin Ballard at September 4, 2005 12:50 AM
GPG keys? How about X.509 personal email certificate? It's easy to get one from thawte.com and it's reasonably well-supported (Mail.app and Outlook at the least support it, and I assume other clients do too). Once you each have exchanged a signed email, you can start sending encrypted emails back and forth, and you don't have to install GPG or generate your own keys or anything.
Posted by: Mac-arena the Bored Zo at September 4, 2005 01:47 AM
one note: the opposites (three) of an NSDictionary are CFDictionary, NSMapTable, and your own custom hash table.
CFDictionary and NSMapTable are the same basic concept: like NSDictionary, but with a C API instead of an Objective-C API. the other difference is that NSDictionary attempts to copy keys when they are stored; the others don't. the reason for this is that if the key is a mutable object, meaning it can change, it's not suitable for use in a hash table, because changing the object changes its hash (the value by which values in the table are looked up).
your own custom hash table carries the risk of making your own bugs, but on the plus side, you get the ultimate control over its implementation (which may prove to be an advantage depending on how your data is organised).
a C array is counterpart only to CFArray and NSArray. they're also harder to resize, rearrange, etc., since (again) you're doing all the work yourself, but (again) you also get that ultimate control over implementation. as for CFArray, CFArray is to NSArray as CFDictionary is to NSDictionary.
Posted by: Dustin Sacks at September 4, 2005 01:59 AM
I'm still living in the deep depths of Mail.app's IMAP support. Woe is me...
I tried out Thunderbird a while ago, but it hurt my head to read text how it was being displayed. Maybe there were some font options I missed, but I had to leave there.
Posted by: Twist at September 4, 2005 02:21 AM
I tried Thunderbird, Eudora, and GyazMail all a while back when Mail wigged out on me but I ended up returning to Mail. Haven't really had any problems with it since 10.3. I do wish it was faster though but you can say that about everything except rising gas prices.
Posted by: LKM at September 4, 2005 03:15 AM
However, this is the only (anti-spam) option for GyazMail
That's not right. POPFile works with all Mail clients, and it's free. It also allows you to define as many buckets as you want.
Personally, I use Mailsmith as my mail client. The feature set is awesome, but it's really slow.
Posted by: drunkenbatman at September 4, 2005 03:27 AM
That's not right. POPFile works with all Mail clients, and it's free. It also allows you to define as many buckets as you want.
Well, sure, someone could install spamassassin locally and tunnel all their mail through it... but then you probably wouldn't be in the target market of GyazMail. :p I'm sure you know what I meant.
Personally, I use Mailsmith as my mail client. The feature set is awesome, but it's really slow.
I do like some of its editing features, but yes, I know what you mean by the slowness. Plus, they should have been condemned for the first version they got out the door for OS X -- everything else they do is quality, but that was atrocious.
Posted by: Tom Lazar at September 4, 2005 04:38 AM
@Kevin: That's not the entire story there. Using IMAPS/POP3S and SMTP with TLS will *only* secure your conversations in these (special) cases:
- both parties have their mail account on the same server
- the mailservers of both parties have a direct VPN connection
Using X.509 only encrypts the traffic between the client and the server - not the traffice between servers. (This is why I have started enforcing the use of encrypted access to my mailservers - this way I can at least guarantee my clients safe intra-domain communications, because you don't have to worry about somebody accessing the mail without encryption)
Posted by: El Barto at September 4, 2005 06:08 AM
Something seems to be exacerbating it a bit in 10.4, but table views and such are just one of the achilles heels when it comes to performance with Cocoa.I.E., when I looked at it, classes like NSDictionary were very, very slow compared to a standard C array.
NSDictionary is no slower than the equivalent map structures in any other programming system, but it's irrelevant as a dictionary (more likely an array of dictionaries) is just one way of storing the contents of a table view. A mail app is more likely to be storing the contents of the table view in a database and pulling data from it in chunks with queries.
Table views are not intrinsically slow - if an application's table view appears slow then it's usually actually the data source that is slow - this isn't a Cocoa thing. I recently wrote a database application that pulled quite complicated queries from a huge database (millions of rows.) By caching chunks of results and by loading the results in a worker thread the application was 100% responsive while scrolling. Even without the background thread, performance would still be acceptable (though they'd be a lag every so often during scrolling.)
The only other thing I can think of that might slow a table view down would be general Quartz slowness.
Posted by: Alex at September 4, 2005 06:29 AM
Much as I would like to use IMAP, I'm stuck on POP3 for the moment, and as such I use Mail.app with very few headaches. I've tried GyazMail before, but it just doesn't work for me. Now, with the advent of Tiger, Mail.app has got a serious ugly problem, so I've been casting around. Thunderbird's icon set is wonderfully lickable, so I'm looking at that right now.
Anyone else ever get the feeling that they want to use Mozilla products on OS X, but just can't for various 'polish' reasons?
Posted by: at September 4, 2005 06:37 AM
"It's cool in the sense that if being in my Dock means your mindshare may go up, the chances of my being showered with swag goes way up, and my ass can always use more hickeys"
No comment about the email situation, but you crack me the fuck up. If you ever make it to Iowa drinks are on me. At least the first few. :-)
Mike
Posted by: Chris McElligott at September 4, 2005 07:31 AM
I'm growing wearing of Mail's constant IMAP syncing problems, you think they would have been fixed in Tiger (but hey neither did the iDisk syncing problems). I've tried to love Thunderbird but its just not in the same league as Mail.
Posted by: Ed Finkler at September 4, 2005 10:07 AM
I would totally use Thunderbird on OS X, but I use the OS X Address Book seriously enough that the lack of integration between Tbird and the AB is a real drawback. Any other platforms it's my client of choice.
Posted by: Oliver at September 4, 2005 10:54 AM
I've thoroughly enjoyed reading this piece and the comments people have posted below. I'm still using Panther - partly because I don't have the means to upgrade right now and partly because I'm actually very happy with 10.3.9 and don't see any benefits in 10.4 that outweigh the (potential) bugs/problems. The only aspect of panther that i'm less than satisfied about is mail.app, and for a while i've been thinking about alternatives.
I downloaded gyazmail after I saw it in a screenshot on this blog I know (www.drunkenblog.com) :-p and I would probably be using it now if it had IMAP support. But it doesn't, so i'm not, and it's nice to know that i shouldn't hold my breath waiting for this feature either!
I'm going to get Thunderbird and Eudora now and give them a try (and read the comments and such on versiontracker and macupdate).
Seriously, why don't anyone just make a 'netnewswire-for-email' app, with widescreen. Simple, fast, full featured and elegant. Is it really that hard?
Posted by: neil at September 4, 2005 11:11 AM
I posted a long (and slightly out-of-date) wish list for a dream email client[1] for OS X over two years ago and we're still no closer. Mail under Tiger is much improved and is enough for now, but I'm still hoping that someone will come along and create a new client that knocks it out of the park.
[1]: http://www.beatnikpad.com/archives/2003/06/08/my_kingdom_for_an_email_client
I had a lot of hopes for Gyazmail and Thunderbird, but both will probably never rise to the top because of the lack of development and lack of OS integration respectively. For a company that makes the best text editor, Mailsmith is absolutely horrible, and Entourage 2004 still has that database and way too much bloat.
I help out with Steve at Cocoatech (creator of Path Finder[2]), and if we had more resources we'd just create our own client. But taking on another application that has direct competition with Apple might be a bit foolhardy, at this point. :)
[2]: http://www.cocoatech.com/pf.php
Posted by: Steve at September 4, 2005 12:16 PM
Totally agree with the views expressed re Mailsmith. When I first switched over from Windows this was the stand-out client for me, comeing over from The Bat on Windows. Now with only 6000 messages it feels slow enough that I leave it open on a virtual desktop rather than ever restart it.
The pace of development seems glacial compared to other applications and even the forums seem pretty dead. I only joined those to get any hint of future development. I have been trying alternatives such as PowerMail and Mail.app but keep coming back to Mailsmith. I will give Gyazmail a try though.
Cheers.
Posted by: Rory at September 4, 2005 05:24 PM
There is nothing particularly slow about NSDictionary or NSTableView. Sure an array of C-structs is faster and more memory efficient but you lose so much functionality and introduce so much scope for bugs it's a fair trade off. If this e-mail app is exhibiting slow behaviour with regards to its tables it is most likely down to a poorly implemented table data source. The table view queries the data source for the information to put in each table row frequently, if the method that returns this information is too heavy (e.g. tries to access files on disk or do heavy calculation) then the table will be slow, but that's the fault of the developer.
Posted by: vastheman at September 4, 2005 07:17 PM
I agree about NSTableView - it's only as slow as its data source and formatters. It doesn't redraw everything when it scrolls, and it does cache data to some extent. It's possible to make an app with a table view that's slow with less than a hundred entries, or fast with several thousand - it all depends on the data source and formatters.
Posted by: Craig Turner at September 4, 2005 08:47 PM
"I originally started using GyazMail because every single email client for OS X sucked, and sucked hard."
This is so true!! I have tried using several clients for IMAP. Firstly Apple mail (which sucks but I keep coming back to it because everything else sucks even more). It just pauses suddenly during operations without any user feedback to suggest what's going on. How can a company that prides itself on UI ship an *email client* that's this crap?! Apple should have teams working hard continuously to focus on just the browsing and email sides of things.
I am frustrated by the email situation on Mac OS X EVERY DAY!
If I had responsibility to get it up to scratch this is what I'd do:
1) Make the development team use their email over a 56k modem all the time. I have broadband as do the majority of high-end users these days, but if the developers knew how it worked on a really slow line you could guarantee that they'd do a much better job of getting the lag out of the system.
2) Make sure a fair portion of these users were using the client as IMAP over SSL (which is the optimal email delivery system, but updates to the OS regularly break or damage something about IMAP or SSL support which suggests Apple don't even test it internally let alone use it)
3) Put displays at the bottom of windows to tell the user what's happening at the moment. If I've just right clicked on something, it's just unacecptable for the software to suddenly freeze for several minutes.
It's not that hard!
In their favour, Apple have *almost* got the browser up to scratch - when I can go to the location bar in Safari and type 'google blah blai' and have it run a google search or 'wp Decidious' and have it link to wikipedia or 'dict decision' and have it go to a dictionary or customise it so that 'api java/util/List' goes to the java API for that class then I'll start using it. (all that functionality has been supported by firefox for ages)
Posted by: Rosyna at September 4, 2005 09:48 PM
I should mention you can avoid the speed hit in NSDictionary if you create it with a CFDictionary. I've actually tested this (back in 10.3) and noticed a *huge* performance difference with huge data sets. objc_msgSend is just slow.
Posted by: vastheman at September 4, 2005 10:02 PM
Don't you mean *access* it with CFDictionary? Due to toll-free bridging, NSDictionary and CFDictionary are the same thing. You access dictionaries far more often than you create them. So creating them with CFDictionary wouldn't give you anywhere near the gain of accessing them with CFDictionary... rather that the NSDictionary methods.
Posted by: erikh at September 5, 2005 11:08 AM
I've had great success with IMAP and Mail.app.
The big trick (after much searching, I found this) is to allow Mail.app one connection per folder accessed, as it can't multiplex an IMAP connection. Setting the connections per client to around 20 worked for me, as Mail.app uses about 4-5 at any time for my two accounts that I check regularily.
This is easily done in Courier IMAP, which is the IMAP server I use.
Now, that's extremely resource-hungry for big ISP's, but most of them aren't serving IMAP anyways.
I hope that's not a "it's the server's fault" post, but it is working well here. :)
Posted by: Rosyna at September 5, 2005 11:31 AM
Depending on how you create a CFDictionary, the API will do different things when you call methods on them. It's all kind of whacked. So you'd want to create it as a CFDictionary *and* access it as such for the best performance shizzle.
Posted by: Jeremy Rossi at September 5, 2005 04:35 PM
Mulberry is about the only way to do email on the Mac. It has it's faults and a steep learning curve. But the pluses far out class other clients: GPG/PGP support, real IMAP support, server side everything, and it supports Widescreen mode.
Posted by: Craig Turner at September 5, 2005 08:49 PM
erikh,
Thanks very much for your suggestion about IMAP. I've reconfigured and I'll see how it goes.
Posted by: foobar at September 10, 2005 12:11 AM
@Tom Lazar:
You don't understand. X.509 certificates can additionally be used for S/MIME as well, which provides end-to-end encryption, much like PGP. Google for S/MIME or CMS for more information.
Gah, I sound like a stalker...
But anywho, I use Eudora. I love it, it does what I need it to do, it handles large amounts of email (857,200 messages to date) without crashing, and it sucks the least of all the other OS X email clients.