Email

We all get too much email. Mail from coworkers, friends, businesses, and most of all spammers. One thing I’ve noticed that when I upgraded to Mavericks, I recovered about 125GB of disk space. My boot disk is a 500GB SSD and when I was on Mountain Lion, I had about 100GB free. And due to trim support, it was still fast IO. And when I upgraded to Mavericks, I had about 225GB free! I think part of it was the spotlight index had grown considerably thanks to the email I get. I usually keep a close eye on the computer just to know where extra cycles are being used. And of course, one of the biggest drains on computing resources was the mail program. Huh?

Why is that? I opened up Activity Monitor and sure enough the mail program was using 100% cpu pretty consistently. What could it be doing? I’m not that paranoid, but I can’t help but think that Apple must be scanning my email and sending them to their servers. But even then, I would see more bandwidth usage rather than cpu. Ugh… At least the email program is free and came along with Mavericks. So I started looking for different email apps. I didn’t want to use the web interface. Have to admit that Google has done a very good job of improving it over the years. It feels like a real web application now, but doesn’t feel like a desktop application. Having grown up with Outlook, I’ve gotten spoiled with the consolidated contacts, calendar, tasks and email. There really isn’t any desktop application like that for Mac. I’ve found Postbox and I’m currently trying it again. I used it a few iterations ago. And my complaint back then was that it was resource heavy. I was quite pleasantly surprised with how little cpu it used when it was just fetching and sending emails. And when I wasn’t using it, it was just idle and not using much cpu!

More to come about this product, but so far so good!