At the start of the year I switched my e-mail client from Outlook to Thunderbird on the PC. Yesterday I made another transition - I'm now using Apple's standard Mail app on the Mac to read my mail. I considered using Thunderbird on the Mac, but while it's a reasonably serviceable client, Thunderbird just doesn't have the fit-and-finish or feature level of either of the native applications.

I looked at using Emailchemy to bring my existing archive over from Thunderbird, but it didn't do a good job converting the Thunderbird 2.0 beta files (after importing the files into Mail, it claimed all the messages were on the server, which was very odd considering that the mailboxes were POP, not IMAP). Ultimately I decided that it didn't matter, as I'll have access to the archive on the PC for the foreseeable future.

Overall, my first impression is that Mail is way ahead of Thunderbird as far as polish and functionality go, but somewhat behind Outlook in functionality. On the other hand, it's not as much of a bloated pig as Outlook either, and after using it I'll probably discover some things it can do that Outlook can't. Adding in MailTags takes care of several big missing chunks of functionality, and Growl notifications are nice as well. So for the moment I'm happy.