Several months ago I saw somebody mention a new mail client that had much better threading behavior than most. There wasn’t any description of the behavior itself, nor any reasoned critique of what is wrong with how mail clients like Outlook Express or Thunderbird handle threads, but I was intrigued, so I went to check it out. A beta copy of Postbox was soon running on my laptop, and would shortly end up on my home and work desktop machines.

There are supposedly a number of Social Media / Web2.0 reasons to use Postbox, which explains the presence of a Facebook button that I never clicked. Other features I didn’t get much mileage out of (your results may vary) include a sidebar when viewing a message, containing contact information (ooh, a silhouette where the photo I don’t maintain of my coworker would go!), a listing of all attachments and external links in the message. This proved mildly useful maybe twice. Maybe I’m just old and set in my ways.

The real selling point here (selling point? more on that in a moment) is the threading, though. Take for example the following mailing list discussion with over a dozen responses, first in Mozilla Thunderbird:

In Postbox the whole thread is displayed as a single item by default. Selecting that single line will display the whole conversation formatted much like you’d expect from a mailing list digest. No expanding a thread into a big messy tree is necessary, but if you feel you need to pick out a single message from the discussion, everything’s presented cleanly and sorted by whatever criteria you are currently sorting the folder by (in my case this is nearly always chronological, but hey).

A small touch that I rather appreciated with Postbox what that old threads will display by the date of the most recent reply, not the date on which the thread started. This worked very nicely for me; it is a behavior familiar from web bulletin boards in which people will frequently “bump” a topic to the top of a forum and thus revive a discussion. I’m not in the habit of deleting mail as I read it, so getting to a new post in a week-old topic would frequently involve some digging around. Not efficient.

The only problem I ran into with Postbox was the new-message alerts. I was repeatedly notified of unread messages as though they were new. I may have retrieved a new message five minutes ago, but that does not mean I necessarily read it. To have a pane appear notifying me of new messages while I’m in another application is a useful feature. To be repeatedly notified about the same unread status message from some automated system I don’t actively care about at the moment is just a nuisance. A minor nuisance, one I’m willing to live with.

Then the dealbreaker: a notification that I had 14 days to register my copy.

I don’t normally think of myself as a cheapskate. I am not in the habit of clipping coupons or attending short-term pricing events at local retailers. I’ve been known to occasionally purchase brand-name acetaminophen.That said, I’m not in the habit of paying for stuff that I’ve had free-of-charge for years. I can switch back to the mail client that came with my operating system and be reasonably content. I can switch back to Thunderbird and be quite content. I like Postbox, but I can’t value it at $39.95. I wouldn’t pay that much for a web browser, either.

I recommend Postbox 1.0 as a mail client for anybody who is operating on a somebody-else’s-money basis.