Mac 101

August 28, 2009 in Reviews by Bob Faulhaber

Why another mail client for the Macintosh? Doesn’t the Mac come with a pretty good mail client? We agree, but Postbox seems to take mail clients to another level.

Postbox (still in Beta for Mac OS X) seems to be a better, faster way to organize and manage your email. With many features, such as search, tagging, conversation views, archiving and powerful editing tools, just to name a few, Postbox gives us a glimpse of some of the features we’ve been waiting for in Apple’s Mail.app.

After downloading the Postbox disk image from their website and mounting the disk image, installation is as simple as dragging the app to the Application folder.

When you start Postbox for the first time an Import Wizard is launched allowing you to import Preferences, Account Settings, Address Book and other settings directly from Apple Mail. We opted to setup our account manually using the dialog box, which lists just about all of the major email providers.

If you have multiple email accounts, Postbox allows you to set them up as needed.

Once configured and start, Postbox look similar to other mail clients, with your mail accounts and folders listed on the left and your messages listed, with a message preview in the main window portion. From this window, you can read, delete, organize and archive messages by clicking the menu bar icons. In addition, Postbox support social networking sites, Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook.

We especially like the Quick Tagging feature that allows you to assign topics/categories, which organizes your messages in the Favorite Topics folders. You can create additional topics to augment the pre-defined topics.

Composing messages is simple using a full-featured message composition window, that allows you add addresses, CC’s and BCC’s as needed. In addition the message window includes formatting options where you can set fonts, sizes, colors and other options as needed.

Another nice feature when creating messages is the Compose Sidebar which organizes files and content, making it easy to find and organize attachments to be included in messages.

Postbox also includes anti-phishing and anti-malware services built-in, which protect against viruses, spyware and trojan horses by checking against a database that is updated automatically every 30 minutes. This is an especially useful feature with the ever-increasing amounts of spam and phishing attacks that we are all facing.

All-in-all we are very impressed with what we see in this beta of Postbox and are looking forward to the final release of the application. It’s included features should be noted by Apple as to what many users would like to see in Apple’s Mail app. If not, then Postbox would be a great replacement that provides many of the features that can make your mail processing easier.