I’ve been pushing the limits of my mid-2010 13″ MacBook Pro lately, running all sort of applications and leaving them running. There has been occasions where the machine will freeze while it struggles to schedule the CPU time to all of the applications.
I use a lot of email, and by a lot I don’t mean 10 emails per day. No joke. The features of Apple Mail 5.0 are actually enough for my daily use but it does feel a little bit sluggish with 5 IMAP accounts.
Recently, I signed up to Shortmail via my Twitter account. The idea is nice. 500 characters max per email, straight to the point.
While casually browsing through my Twitter stream last night I saw people talking about setting up Sparrow to access Shortmail and sending attachments via Dropbox.
I was thinking, Shortmail is short, Sparrow is light. Combining them together should be nice… and since all of my email accounts are now running via IMAP, why not give Sparrow a try with Shortmail before using it for serious communications.
I downloaded Sparrow through the website to try it out, instead of buying it from the Mac App Store for $9.99
I was pleased that it only asked for my email address and password so I entered my Shortmail account details. It was nice. Shortmail’s logo was displayed on the screen. But it took ten minutes to sync my 3 messages. I don’t know what it was doing and I’m not sure whether the waiting time is caused by Shortmail servers or Sparrow itself.
One thing I hate the most is how markup is displayed in the preview lines in Sparrow. It’s not in Facebook’s email but markup are there for the first 2 emails.
I can understand if there are glitches in Shortmail as it’s still fresh but I don’t expect glitches from Sparrow. I wonder how long it would take for it to sync my gigs of emails from other email accounts. I can’t even imagine and I can’t afford to waste so much time.
Looks likes it’s going to be a while before I am convinced to try Sparrow again. I am glad I didn’t rush to buy the app for $9.99 in the Mac App Store. For now, I’m leaving it to AppZapper to cleanup!
Update 16 December 2011 11:15 AM GMT+8
Less than an hour ago, I received a shortmail from Shortmail telling me that they are working on a new version of their IMAP service that should make a difference. This is great news for those who prefer using Shortmail service via regular email clients. From @Shortmail‘s timeline I can see that they are responding to many users about improving the IMAP service.
Keep up the good work! By the way, my Shortmail address is romantikaname [at] shortmail [dot] com
Thanks for the shortmail! This is nice, and it shows that you are serious about what you do!
For the record, I was more disappointed with Sparrow displaying ugly markup on the preview pane.
