My New Favorite Email Client, Sparrow

Email Ennui I've had a love/hate relationship with Apple's OS X Mail app for quite a while. I loved it because it was well integrated with OS X and unlike Outlook Express on Windows, Mail was actually quite functional. But Mail has its issues. I've had lots of crashes, every OS X update seems to break some add-on I'd installed, and searching old messages wasn't very effective. I tried the power user-focused Postbox and liked a lot about it, but it was too much for me. I then hoped that Lion's Mail would be the update to finally get everything right. While I think Lion's Mail app is a good email app, I didn't like the layout as much as I hoped I would (although I don't hate it as much as some people seem to). I decided it was time to find something better. I had tried out Sparrow when it was in beta, but I held off buying the app when it launched because I wanted to stick with Mail if possible and I was waiting to see how Mail in Lion turned out. Well, with me being disappointed with Mail in 10.7 and Sparrow having come a long way (now up to 1.4), I was happy when I got a copy to try out from its developer. After just two days of use, I'm sure I won't be opening up Apple's Mail again any time soon. I'm extremely happy with Sparrow and here's why. Email Excellence Sparrow looks a lot like the original Tweetie for Mac. Accounts are laid out in the app's sidebar and things like inbox, starred emails, and search are listed the same way as @replies, DMs and search are in Tweetie. The biggest difference between Apple Mail and Sparrow is that Sparrow was originally designed for Gmail. It now does normal IMAP as well, but if you're a Gmail user, Sparrow handles starred email and labels like a champ. It even shows priority inbox tags if you've enabled the feature in the Gmail web app. Sparrow also features Cloud integration for sharing attachments, but don't worry, you can still send them the old fashioned way too. The app can connect to Facebook too for acquiring contact photos of email senders. My biggest gripe about Apple Mail was its crappy search. The app had issues (for me, at least) with searching through messages back on the server. Sparrow does a great job syncing messages and allows for great searching (offline even!). There's also a nifty "new message" shortcut option so that you can quickly start a new email no matter what application you have The app sells for $9.99 (as of October 17, 2011) and I can't recommend it enough. It's lightweight, fast, and is built to wrangle Gmail like a pro.

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My New Favorite Email Client, Sparrow is an episode from Kernel Panic.

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This episode was published on Oct 17, 2011.

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