I became a convert to Mail.app on Mac OS X from the first day I tried it. That isn’t to say that it was perfect, but I preferred putting up with the flaws in Mail.app than the flaws in other email clients. Now that I’ve upgraded to Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4) the same is still true. There are still plenty of things I personally would change about Mail.app 2, but it still seems to be the least evil of all my evil choices for email clients on the Mac.
If you use an IMAP email server then you are probably already familiar with the “IMAP Path Prefix” setting in Mail.app. Apple made a change in the way that setting works in Mail.app that bit me when I tried to connect to a UW IMAP server. In my case the path was “/home/scottj/mail”, which generally works fine in most IMAP email clients. In Mail.app on Tiger though it kept removing the first slash, so my /home/scottj/mail kept turning into home/scottj/mail, which is not the same thing. It appears (I haven’t seen this confirmed anywhere) that Mail.app in Tiger now really wants to have a relative path for the “IMAP Path Prefix”. So I changed my /home/scottj/mail to simply mail and then suddenly worked as before.
If you are connecting to a Courier-IMAP server (which I am also doing) you can still set your “IMAP Path Prefix” to INBOX to make Mail.app understand that it shouldn’t put all of the folders as sub-folders of your inbox.
If you’ve got any other tips for making Mail.app play nice with various email servers leave a comment below. At some point the UW-IMAP server that I connect to now will be replaced with an Exchange 2003 server, I’ll leave another note about that if I run into any issues.