I’m sorry to keep banging on about this, but it really makes me mad that handling an IMAP email account should be such hard work.

Last night, Mail was misbehaving again. I was searching for a particular message I knew was there, using a keyword I knew was present in the message, but Mail stubbornly refused to find anything. After finding the message I wanted manually, by opening my storage mailbox and scrolling through it, I angrily decided to look elsewhere. Again.

My friend Dave said he’d ditched Mail in recent weeks, to move to Thunderbird. “It’s so much faster than Mail,” he said. “And you can do almost everything with the keyboard.”

So I fired up Thunderbird again and re-taught my fingers to hit different keys to the ones they are used to, and forced myself to put up with the fact that Thunderbird always brings the browser to the front when you click a link (Mail is able to keep the browser in the background when you Command-click). I stuck with it almost half a day, and was just starting to feel comfortable when I found myself needing to search again - and guess what?

Thunderbird pulled the same trick. It wouldn’t find a message I knew to exist.

By now I was ready to pull my hair out at its roots, but I stayed calm, quit Thunderbird, and tried faithful old Eudora again. Nothing does searches like Eudora, I reminded myself. But Eudora looks awful, it won’t put outgoing messages anywhere other than its own Out folder, and has the same URL-clicking trouble (although see Krioni’s comment on my last email moan for a possible solution for this). It lasted about 10 minutes.

Powermail, which I tried in earnest just a few weeks ago, had some kind of hissyfit and crashed to a halt every time I tried to connect to the mail server. Oh well.

I was on the verge of downloading Mailsmith to give it a go when I remembered that it doesn’t do IMAP at all. I spent two minutes thinking of more options - GyazMail, Mulberry, even Entourage - and realised that at this rate, I might spend an entire working day just messing about trying to find The Perfect Email Program, which we all know is just a myth.

So I said aloud: “I cannot be bothered,” and went back to Mail once again.

I know it will drive me mad again sooner or later (probably sooner), but I think today’s messing about has taught me this: it’s quicker and less hassle to cope with Mail’s occasional mood swings than it is to spend hours and hours trying to find something that doesn’t have slightly different, but equally infuriating, mood swings of its own.

Let’s hope the rise of AI doesn’t bring about software with *real* mood swings…