Do most people still use a mail client

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or, do most just log into their mail via a browser?
I only ask because I believe the Apple Mail client has some issues.
I have recently been having problems with a 1 year old Mac Mini which will lock up (totally) when put into sleep mode. I had Apple Mail set to check for new mail every hour. I now close the Mail app before I put the Mini to sleep, and, so far, it hasn't locked up.
I also raised a ticket with Apple support who told me there is a known issue with sleep mode and the computer locking up. They didn't say anything about the Mail app, or what might be causing this, they only said they hoped to provide a fix at a later date.
 
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Hello - you might want to provide the OS X installed on your Mac Mini - there have been issues w/ Mavericks some of which have been addressed by Apple (maybe?).

We have nearly year old Macs (iMac & MBPro) both upgraded to Mavericks; our mail accounts are w/ Yahoo - I use Mail on my laptop and have not had any major issues; wife uses the iMac and complained about Mail on her computer, so she uses Yahoo on Safari. So, we have a 'mixed' family experience, I guess. Dave :)
 
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I, too had many issues with Mail, both in Mountain Lion and in Mavericks. In ML, the lockups coming out of sleep were roughly 85-90% of the ti (not just closing it) the Mail proggie before sleeping the MBA and things were fine.

I then upgraded to Mavericks and instead of lockups, after almost every session where I slept the unit for minutes to a couple of hours, when it was time to shut down the machine (and yes, I've been told not to do that so often but I still do-lots of power spikes in my region) I would have to Force Quit the Mail program almost every time. It just would not shut down on it's own.

I just underwent my first (and second) clean install of Mavericks with help from forum members here and a Mac Life staffer. It was a relatively painless procedure...the first time taking about 2 hours (that included downloading and creating a bootable thumb drive) and the second time, the following day, only took 45 minutes.

It's been about a week now and I have yet to have an issue with Mail (and I am firmly knocking on my wooden desk right now :)

I learned several things from my clean install.... 1) It's not that hard to do. 2) Practice makes you a LOT faster, 3) you gain a TON of room on your drive if you don't do a restore) and 4) your machine runs like a scalded cat! and probably most importantly, 5) If you were having "issues" with one or more programs performing a clean install can (not 100% always) clear up those issues.

That's my 0.02. :D

Cheers!

Pat
 

bobtomay

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My first guess would be that the issue is with the 'Power Nap' feature.

Give a try turning it off and see if that stops the issues - link.
I have turned it off on my Mac - the wife is still using it - but she doesn't use Mail either.

While we don't recommend doing a clean install to fix issues most of the time - particularly if you've been doing upgrade installs, it could very well take care of some issues (sometimes strange issues).
 
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Hello - you might want to provide the OS X installed on your Mac Mini - there have been issues w/ Mavericks some of which have been addressed by Apple (maybe?).

We have nearly year old Macs (iMac & MBPro) both upgraded to Mavericks; our mail accounts are w/ Yahoo - I use Mail on my laptop and have not had any major issues; wife uses the iMac and complained about Mail on her computer, so she uses Yahoo on Safari. So, we have a 'mixed' family experience, I guess. Dave :)

Sorry. It's Mavericks.
 

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I have been using Mail since OSX 10.2 on the following systems, Old Power Mac 7600 with G3 CPU, Many G4's, iBook G4, iMac G5 iSight, 3 different Mac Mini's both PPC and Intel C2d, Intel Imacs and Macbook and never have had one issue with Mail and I leave Mail running the whole time the machine is on. Always comes out of sleep just fine.

Not sure what is causing issues for you but I can not duplicate it here.
 
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To answer your topic question, you'd need poll data. Now, you could do a poll here, but the sample size would be small and skewed. So you could do a web search and see if anyone has done a scientific poll. As for me, I've never used Apple's Mail, just a browser. (I also had AOL before Mail existed.)
 
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i have used Mac Mail since 06 with just a few minor glitches along the way but since Maverick's its been trouble free.
 
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Mavericks Mail is just fine and trouble free. Then again I always choose to do a format and install rather than a simple upgrade. Like others have used Mac Mail only since 1995 or so.
 

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Used Mac Mail since '06 - only real issues were created by the guy at the keyboard.

I have had my MBA not be able to come out of sleep - at all - a few times - or would come out and then freeze or black screen immediately - it was fairly rare and has not happened in awhile - if it doesn't happen again within another month - then I'll be willing to say it coincided with my decision to turn off Power Nap.
 
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only real issues were created by the guy at the keyboard.


In motoring terms known as 'the nut behind the wheel?'
 
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Ive used Mac Mail since Leopard, and the only issue i ever had, was problems with the .hotmail account authenticating and needing a password all the time. Once i got a new mail address all was ok even in Mavericks.
I dotn do a great deal apart from send and receive mail, but i ended up going for Airmail from the Mac App Store, because i like the way the Dev was going with it, (reading the forums he is very involved) and i wanted a bit of flare/colour when i was using it, and i could customise it to suit me. The only thing i don't like about it is i can't go to the "Classic" view as in Mac Mail.
At the end of the day Mac Mail work very well, and Apple have done a lot with it, in the last couple of years. It even supports GPGMail for secure signing of a email.
 

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The nice thing about Mac Mail is that the interface is simple and easy to use with both PoP and IMAP. The only thing I don't like about Mail is the way it stores messages. Mail messages are buried 4 or 5 folders deep and very difficult to restore even if you faithfully use Time Machine. I purposely keep archived messages stored on the server for that very reason. Of course since I use gmail, I have plenty of storage space to work with.
 

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If Mail bothers you, there's always third party clients such as Thunderbird of, if you use Office 2011, Outlook (Entourage if using an older version).
 
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Ahh for the days of Netscape Navigator and Netscape Communicator and OS X.7.6.1 hey vansmith?
 

chscag

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Actually, the original version of Microsoft Mail and News that was standard with Windows 95, 98, and ME was pretty good. Later versions that came with Windows 2000 and XP were not near as good. The Mail client with OS X reminds me in some ways of the older MS mail client that I mentioned above. Thunderbird Mail is also very good.
 
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Mid 2011 iMac now on Mavericks. Prefer mail client, but like to have the web option available. Only problem I've ever had with Mail is that for a couple of weeks recently I had to quit then restart Mail to get it to download new mail. Seems to have resolved. I like the app, though I miss the all-in-one convenience of Outlook.
 

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If you have Office 2011, you may have Outlook. You could also look into Thunderbird - it has calendering addons and I think it might do contacts as well (don't quote me on that though).
 
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I've used Mac Mail since Leopard, and the only issue i ever had, was problems with the .hotmail account authenticating and needing a password all the time. Once i got a new mail address all was ok even in Mavericks.

My exact experience too. Once I dropped hotmail and started up a gmail account, things were a lot better.

For whatever reason, those authenticating/password issues never occurred on my iPhone or iPad. I have hotmail and gmail in the Mail app on my iOS devices and it works fine in that environment.
 
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chas_m

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I've not had any issues with Mail (the Apple default) on Mavericks or any previous version, but I have heard that there are some Gmail issues with Mail in Mavericks. I don't check my old Gmail account anymore really, but on the rare occasions I do I use a web browser.

As for the overall trend, it seems to me that more people are using webmail (largely thanks to Gmail) these days, but they are using email overall less than before (thanks to iMessage, texting and instant messaging generally). To put this another way, I don't think Facebook would pay $19+ billion for any existing email program. :)
 

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