Gonna ditch Mail.app - which alternative?

Entourage, Thunderbird, or other…

I love mail, but I’m having a serious problem that totally disables my machine functioning as a spam drone - that damn problem where Mail.app asks for your password when it is checking mail. I leave for work in the morning, and a few hours later (sometimes it’s OK for a few days at a time, but it is not predictable) I notice that all spam messages are coming through to the devices that I use to check email, and items I place in the AddToSpam folder just stay there. At the end of the day when I get home, I remote into the drone, only to find that Mail.app is waiting for me to enter my email password - I do, and everything is back to normal. If I delete the pertinent keychain items, the problem usually goes away for a bit, but I certainly wouldn’t call it a reliable, long lasting solution.

So sadly, I feel I really must find something more reliable, so I’d like to know what program would be the best (not including Mail.app, because of this crippling bug) to use as s SpamSieve drone.

Thanks to all,
CJ

Contrary to what the dialog says, this is usually due to errors contacting the mail server and nothing to do with needing the password.

Personally, I wouldn’t use Eudora or Thunderbird because they don’t allow spam filters full access to the attachment information (thus reducing accuracy). And they’re not scriptable enough to act as drones, anyway. Mailsmith and PowerMail are very good and very scriptable, but they don’t have sufficient IMAP support to act as drones. GyazMail supports IMAP now, but I don’t think it’s scriptable enough to act as a drone. That leaves Entourage, which I think would work but which would need additional AppleScripts written to run as a drone.

It would probably be easier, though, to stick with Mail and find some way around the password dialog problem. Either address the source of the connection difficulties or find a script (I believe there are several out there) to automatically dismiss the dialog so that it doesn’t interfere with mail reception.

After many years using Eudora, Entourage and Apple Mail, last year I dumped all of them and switched to Thunderbird completely. At first SpamSieve was not available for TBird, but it is now. I thoroughly enjoy Tbird’s customization options. Just the other day I re-opened Entourage to check on something and couldn’t believe how clunky the application was. For my needs (I use IMAP accounts exclusively), TBird is an excellent program. It works well with SpamSieve with a 98.4% accuracy.

Egidio, have you ever had problems with Thunderbird asking for your email password unexpectedly? How often do you have Thunderbird to check mail.

I’m wondering if haing Mail.app set to check mail every minute is causing a problem.

I’m glad that you like using Thunderbird with SpamSieve, but it’s irrelevant to the original poster’s question since Thunderbird cannot function as a drone.

Yes. That could very easily be the problem. If it takes your server and/or mail client longer than the one minute to complete before another mail fetch is initiated, then it could very well make the host appear to be “busy” and thus your mail not available, and thus you get the poorly worded error message requesting re-entry of your password.