sparrow

My new favourite email client

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Screenshot of Apple Mail running on Mac OS X Lion

For many years I was a Mozilla Thunderbird user; I even used the beta builds back in 2003, long before its final 1.0 release. Though I still use it at work, where I deal with large volumes of email, at home it was overkill, and so I bought a copy of Sparrow which was simpler and lighter. Except last summer development of Sparrow basically stopped, thanks to Google taking over the Sparrow team.

Sparrow still works okay but with its future looking similar to that of Twitter’s official app I decided to start looking for alternatives. And I found one in a very unexpected place – already on my Mac.

When I switched to a Mac back in 2005, I carried on using Thunderbird, as back then I was still keen on its extensions and its flexibility, so I never bothered with Mail, which is the native email client available on all Macs. And in the almost 8 years since I’ve never bothered to revisit Mail, bar a couple of times out of curiosity when I’ve found it to be a bit over-complicated.

But then I found this article: Turning Mail.app Into the Best Mac Email App, linked from Lifehacker, which explains how to customise Mail to make it more effective. The article has a number of workflow suggestions which I don’t bother with, but it does also suggest how to simplify the interface to make it look, well, more like Sparrow.

It took some time; I have three personal email accounts (one on this domain, plus Gmail and Outlook.com) and Mail defaults to storing saved messages and drafts on local folders, so I had to teach Mail that I actually wanted to use the relevant IMAP folders for this. This involves opening each folder – which Mail confusingly calls ‘Mailboxes’ – and then marking it by clicking the Mailbox menu and using ‘Use this folder for’. Sparrow and Thunderbird both do this through Account Settings, and they both correctly configure Gmail automatically anyway.

Once done, though, I had a nice, clean and simple setup, with a unified inbox view of all three email accounts. Mail’s actually relatively efficient when it comes to system resources and, broadly speaking, uses about the same amount of RAM as Sparrow did.

Maybe I should have taken a fresh look at Mail sooner. It gets an update in each new version of OS X, and doesn’t cost anything extra.

First Thunderbird, now Sparrow…

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The logo for the Sparrow email client in Google's colours.

I’m not having a good time with email clients. Earlier this month we learned that Thunderbird would not get any major feature updates in future (development will continue but Mozilla has reduced Thunderbird’s resources). And now Sparrow, my favoured email client on Mac OS X and on my iPhone, has been acquired by Google.

This may not sound like bad news but, alas, this is a ‘talent acquisition’ – a bit like when Facebook bought Gowalla last year. In other words, the people behind Sparrow will be working on new projects at Google, specifically on the Gmail teams, and won’t be doing any further work on Sparrow itself – this was confirmed by a Google spokesperson to Macstories. We can expect ongoing support for Sparrow, but no new features.

The Mac OS X version is reasonably complete in terms of features – in fact, it has just been updated for the new Retina displays in Apple’s latest MacBook Pro, and presumably will work with Mountain Lion without any problems. As for the iOS version, it can do almost everything that the stock email client for the iPhone can do (and more), but with the notable exception of push notifications of new email messages. This was likely to be a premium feature due to how push notifications work on iOS with background apps. Presumably, today’s announcement means that this won’t be forthcoming; similarly, a rumoured iPad app is now unlikely to be released.

Whilst I’m happy for Sparrow’s developers to be recognised for their talent, and presumably Google were able to give them an offer that they could not refuse, this potentially leaves Sparrow’s users in the lurch. Of course, there’s a limit to what you can do with what was always intended to be a simple email client – part of the reason for the slowdown of Thunderbird development – but the iOS client in particular showed a lot of promise that now won’t be realised.

The likelihood of Sparrow finding a new home in Google was slim in any case; Google doesn’t tend to do much in the way of desktop software (Chrome, Drive, Earth and Picasa are the only major exceptions) and there’s already an official Gmail app for iOS, which has been updated recently and, crucially, supports push notifications. And keeping Sparrow going at Google whilst its developers focus on other things would have been a distraction.

I hope that, instead, Sparrow offer to sell the branding rights and source code to somebody else, to keep it going. Or, better yet, make it open source, so that the community can keep it going. On iOS, the jailbreak community have already written various enhancements, such as Sparrow+.

I suppose I’ll have to investigate Apple’s own Mail app in Mountain Lion. I tried to use it recently as an alternative to Thunderbird, but in Lion it feels over-complicated and poorly designed.

Addendum: There’s an interesting post from Elezea which I also agree with.

Thunderbird on life support

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Screenshot of Mozilla Thunderbird 13 on OS X

It is with a little sadness that Mozilla Thunderbird will no longer receive resources from the Mozilla Foundation. The decision has been made to focus on other products (mainly Firefox), and that there’s not much room for further innovation in desktop email clients – especially as many people now use webmail services exclusively.

I’ve been a long-time user of Thunderbird – right back to version 0.1 alpha (then called Minotaur) which I reviewed back in April 2003. It’s come on a long way since then, and is still my favourite email client on Windows – especially with the Lightning extension adding a calendar feature. A myriad of other extensions has also allowed me to customise it how I want.

That being said, in some ways it’s no longer meeting my needs. I use at work – officially we’re supposed to use Outlook but there are many people using Thunderbird instead, as its IMAP support is much better. This is fine for our email server which is Unix based, but if we ever move to a Microsoft solution then the lack of support for Exchange, even after all of these years, makes Thunderbird fall short.

I also no longer use Thunderbird at home; earlier this year, I moved to Sparrow which offers a much simpler and lighter experience. Thunderbird is great for an all-singing, all-dancing email client and great for the large volumes of mail that I get spanning different folders, but at home, I just want something basic that can stay in the background. It may have far fewer features but Sparrow suits my needs better. Thunderbird is still installed for the few times when I work from home, but I may now look into Apple’s own email client instead.

As I understand it, the next release of Thunderbird will be an ‘extended support release’, at which point it will receive fixes for major bugs and security issues, but no new features – at least, not from Mozilla themselves. It’ll still be hosted by Mozilla and, being open source, should ‘the community’ want to contribute patches to it then they will be welcome to. Postbox remains as a commercial fork of Thunderbird, although its £30 price tag is high.

It’s a shame to see Thunderbird fade into further obscurity but an understandable one. Many users just don’t need a desktop email client anymore, because they pick up their email on a mobile device or webmail. Outlook and Lotus Notes rule the corporate roost. That doesn’t leave much of a market for Thunderbird to serve.