Other than browsers, my favorite type of application to switch around is my mail client. As essential as it is on a daily basis, I find I get frustrated with them after a while and forget long enough what the quirks were to try something I’ve tried before.
I’m sure if you search this site, you’ll find my experiences with Entourage, Mail, Powermail, Mozilla and Thunderbird. Currently I use Mail and generally like it though it does suffer from occasional slow-downs and some magical bugs like folders that won’t delete. Right now I have a folder I tried to delete still showing in my list, though it’s display is totally faded out and if clicked will cause a complete beach ball lock-up.
Over at the unofficial apple weblog, a recent post mentioned Thunderbird started accepting imported mailboxes from Mail. I’ve liked Mozilla and Thunderbird previously, though there is no address book or ichat integration (not surprising), but you can include newsgroups (also available in Entourage). Junk Filtering is also available and quite good and I’ve found the filtering to be strong.
Is a switch in order yet again… I’ve posted a comment over there wondering what the reason might be to switch… feel free to follow there or here. I’d be interested in knowing what people reall like about one or another that might not be in all clients. Sure it’s all about personal preference…what’s yours?