Murphy's law and it's corollaries dictate that not only will things that can go wrong will go wrong, but they will do so at the least possible convenient time. Thus it was that at the end of April as I was getting ready to transition to a few months of full-time travel Apple's Mail app decided to head south. The main symptom was an incredible use of memory. I could launch Mail and a short time later not only would all 8GB of RAM in my machine be swallowed up but it would be using 20GB more on disk for swap space. All and all a totally unusable situation.
Since I now spend precious little time at home I just switched to using MailPlane and called it good. MailPlane uses the native Google Mail interface which has a major advantage in the form of the Send and Archive button. With the flood of hundreds to thousands of emails a day in my inbox this is a powerful tool. However it lacks other processing rules like the priceless Mail Act-On.
A brief deviation here while I rant for a second about how inexplicable it is Google has never come up with the concept of rules applied once email has arrived. In most cases I need to see the message in my inbox and make decisions about it and then I want to process it. Mail Act-On does this beautifully and even uses Apple Mail's rules to full advantage to simplify having the same keystrokes affect multiple accounts and take the right action on an account-by-account basis. But this Google Mail gripe aside back to the story.
