Jumping Ship
I abandoned Apple Mail today, at least for the time being. It having trouble synchronizing over IMAP, getting stuck and crashing on certain folders. If I drop into Offline mode I can tell the folder to rebuild itself, but this only works for a couple hours at most. Deleting local cache files didn’t help. Once it got in its rut it would crash 5-10 seconds after I opened it. I don’t need that sort of distraction when I’m trying to find a piece of e-mail.
I installed Thunderbird and I’m surprised how much I like it. I was never fond of the Windows version. Some of the Mac build’s UI elements are noticibly non-standard and sluggish, but it’s better suited to power users (subscriptions, variety of config options) and the threading is just like Mutt’s: no false message acting as a thread header, and replies are indented in the tree order I’d expect.
Strange, I haven’t had any trouble with Mail synchronizing, even though I access from 2 different clients via IMAP and occasionally via webmail (so there’s frequent need for synchronization). I’ve actually been leaning on Mail more then M2 lately because it handles the synching more smoothly. As far as threads go I haven’t needed them and usually don’t find them useful (I like my new mail on the top), but I imagine if I was organizing something complicated, I’d use a smart folder and sort by date sort by user/date. I usually only have a half dozen or so messages in my inbox, the rest are actioned and deleted or filed (in an IMAP folder) as soon as possible.