I was curious about some of the critical reviews about Sparrow on the app store. These reviews were for 1.0v, not 1.0.1v. Sparrow uses a lot of RAM and CPU, apparently.
I think that's because Sparrow initially syncs a lot of your email over IMAP, which causes CPU / RAM hogging. But once that initial sync has completed, it's fine:
- Sparrow: 64MB/RAM
- Mail: 48MB/RAM
(Netnewswire is currently using 220MB, just to put those numbers into perspective.)
A minor issue of Sparrow tagging sent emails with "Sent with Sparrow".
That's the default signature and it actually is a little bit tricky to figure out where you can change that (Account > Edit). But once you've found the preference, remove that line and you're done. I'm guessing you might not be able to disable that in the lite version though.
A limited notification system upon incoming emails (sound notification is very important to me in an email client).
It has a custom new mail sound (not part of the system's sound set) that is quite nice, but unobtrusive. There's no preference at the moment either, but it does support applescript, so maybe you could have it play a custom alert instead.
The full Gmail web interface is missing, not sure to what extent. I don't want to have to log into Gmail to complete a task, unless I need to adjust a setting, which I'm fine with.
No tasks at all at the moment, so that might be a dealbreaker, also no chat, news, ads, tooltips….
I like that all of that is missing, but ymmv