I'm currently using Microsoft Entourage (the thinking person's Outlook, i.e. the Mac people did this one). It's OK, far better than Netscape Messenger (yes, I know, damning with faint praise), and its filtering is pretty damn good. But it has a few things that really annoy me.
On a minor level, say you do a quick search from a list view - i.e. you can see a whole bunch of messages in a folder, and you want to narrow that list down to messages from a certain person. Say you decide to search on sender, and enter a domain name. It reports no matches. If you do an advanced search from the Find menu - which involves a dialogue box rather than a pane in the toolbar, and puts results in a new window, rather than re-using the current window - it returns a whole bunch. The difference is that, apparently, the quick search only searches on a person's name, and not their email address.
Needless to say, it doesn't tell you it's doing this, and there's no obvious indication that if you want to search on domain (because you remember the person's company but not their name, for instance) you should use the hugely over-engineered search equivalent.
More annoyingly, it has IntelliSense type stuff which you can't turn off. It insists that anything following "i.e." or "e.g." should be capitalised, even though it knows about "etc." - and you can't change its mind on this. As soon as hit return it assumes the next bit is a new sentence, even if you've just hit return for formatting or because you've been entering Perl code. And if you decide you're going to be fancy and say "fora" as the plural of "forums" it insists that you meant to put a space in there so it's the more likely "for a" phrase.
Did I mention that you can't turn this off?
I'd use Mail, except that it proved itself horrendous within minutes of using it because you can't edit the levels of quoting in a message, because it doesn't consider quoting characters editable as such. So Mail.app is unable to let me re-edit quoting to fix horrendous Outlook-style forwarded quoting. (To those who say I could use AppleScript, and possibly Perl, I say go back to your Linux desktops.)
I may eventually have to switch to Eudora. Unless anyone has any better ideas?
Currently listening to: Hand In Hand - Phil Collins, Face Value (I'm ripping old CDs atm)
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