Well, folks, I beta tested Postbox 2, and aside from the fact that there are things I love about Postbox, I cannot make it my new email program. First what I love: the search features are outstanding. The program is fast as lightening and very clean in operation. I never got around to setting up filters, though, and I’ll tell you why.

My major problem with Postbox is that I while don’t mind previewing some mails online in IMAP, I tend to use filters on local folders to store essential copies of my correspondence to and from clients. These records are for my protection. There is no reason nor desire for me to save 40,000 emails in the cloud, and I don’t trust or want the cloud to have that information.

In Entourage, if I click “unread messages,” it shows me all my unread messages in newsgroups or in local folders. Postbox only shows me online unread messages in my in box. All my filtered messages, placed in local folders, remain invisible unless I select each folder individually. This means I am having to look at my online folders and my local folders separately and essentially duplicating my efforts. It means that pre-filtering my messages will cause me problems rather than help me sort incoming messages. And if I don’t filter the messages, then I must manually move every message I want to keep from the online box to a local folder. For me, it is a lot easier to download all my mail and then delete unwanted messages than to manually sort through drag and drop all my incoming mail into folders.

Also, Entourage has a slightly better visual interface for mail preview lists. The tiny lines between messages makes it easier to read and focus, and you can adjust the size of the list fonts.  Postbox causes more eyestrain when viewing in list view.

There are problems with Entourage and I’m not happy with it. It is slow on search. Powermail is also faster for search. There are plenty of crashes in Entourage, and it really doesn’t integrate with Apple’s AddressBook.  I am hoping that the new 2011 version fixes some of these problems. If not, I feel like I’m going to be stuck in limbo Waiting for Godot.

I’ll be waiting on reviews Office 2011 before actually buying an upgrade. I will be using Postbox on my mobile laptop however, since there is no point in downloading and filing messages when I’m on the road. Postbox makes it easy to delete unwanted mail and keep the rest for later filing on my desktop.