• The app emphasizes integration with Google Apps, which can enhance the Google Apps toolset. (Mavenlink is available — and highly ranked — in the Google Apps Marketplace.)
• The final step of a project — invoicing the client — is built right into the tool. Think of Mavenlink like “Basecamp meets Freshbooks” in that regard. The premise of Mavenlink starts with the idea of managing your projects from inception to completion: collaborate, manage, track time and invoice, all in one place.

Here is how the company breaks down its offering:

Using Mavenlink can help streamline your workflow without the heftiness of a complex project management tool such as Microsoft Project,  although the company does have a project tracker including assignments, key dates, and project status. Unlike many project management systems, the built-in time tracker includes an invoice tool built right in (versus others that might integrate with a separate invoicing system). And if you’re using QuickBooks and don’t want to switch to its invoicing system, the company is working on QuickBooks integration. Right now, you can export data as a .CSV.

Mavenlink’s permissions system takes into account the complex relationships you have as you work with both your internal team, subcontractors and clients. Everyone in a project ecosystem can have access to just the parts of a workspace that is relevant to them. With the integration of email and even mobile, everyone has access to project data and can collaborate and share information easily.

The soup to nuts approach to project management seems to set Mavenlink apart from other project management tools that handle only parts of the overall project process. Mavenlink has a freemium model: you can get three active projects, save for the custom branding, for free. Paying subscribers are also assigned a customer service rep who is available by phone, email or text chat.

What project management tool are you using, and how’s it working for you?

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Maybe you’ve built a website that the client decides to modify with no regard for best practices or usability. Or you’ve set up and managed their Facebook or Twitter channels, building the conversations and exchanges to a fever pitch, only to watch their updates and tweets generate crickets. All your hard work — on the client’s behalf, of course — disintegrates before your eyes.

What do you do when you’ve handed over the assets that your client has paid for, and they proceed to muck things up? Here are some tactics to temper the pain:

1. Take out the emotion. Anyone good — developer or creator — infuses passion into their work as well as blood, sweat and tears. But when your contract is over, you have to cut emotional ties with the project or the product.
2. Be prepared for potential disaster. Once something is out of your hands, it is no longer within your control. You have to ready yourself emotionally — and legally — for the possibility that your client will destroy the work you’ve done. Think about adding a clause into your contracts that outlines how you’ll respond to any changes that occur because the client is managing the assets you’ve turned over.
3. Have the conversation. Be open with your client about that clause in your contract that states what you may do after the contract ends. Assure them that you are all for empowering your clients to take over their assets and offer training and guidance, but make it clear what your professional response will be if they deviate drastically from best practices.
4. Develop a contingency plan with your client. Ask your client how they’d like you to handle the potential situation of witnessing them making a gross misstep in modifying the work you’ve done or mismanaging something. What would they want you to do if you saw them go astray?
5. Document carefully. While you are managing the assets, document everything. Take screenshots, track things, measure things, list things and compile any information that gives a clear picture of what you did and what was working while the assets were in your hands. After the contract ends, if you see problems arising, document everything to show the “before” and “after.” Record your assessment of their changes using clear, unemotional language and outline where you feel they’ve taken a wrong turn.
6. Make your case to step back into the mix. If you’ve kept the lines of communications open with your former client, approach them respectfully with your assessment and review the state of what you created for them. (Remember, again, to take out the emotion). Give a solid business case for re-engagement to help them get back on track. A smart businessperson will take the data you give them and will determine the ROI of renewing a contract with you versus letting their assets flounder or fail. Throughout this process, stay positive, encouraging and helpful.
7. Cut ties. If your former client decides they can handle things — and you feel they’re on a downward spiral — exercise your “what we’ll do if you mess things up” clause in your contract. The best course of action if there is no way to salvage the work you did is to distance yourself from the mess. You might consider removing the case study you’ve had on your website. Better yet, make sure your case study doesn’t link to the actual site or asset but instead uses screenshots that demonstrate the work you did. You can include a professionally-worded statement that the contract with the client ended on a particular date, and you are no longer engaged in managing the asset or that the client took over and that the current asset reflects their modifications. Again, stay positive. Never badmouth a client even if they are no longer your client. In the worst-case scenario, you may have to entirely remove any references to the client or the work you did for them to protect your company’s reputation. Only you can decide if and when drastic measures are necessary. At that point, focus on the good work you have done and continue to do and chalk it up to life as a consultant. You can only do so much, and once something is out of your hands, you just have to let it go.

What have you done in the past when a client messes things up?

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The Language Gap

While I am trilingual, for each of the languages I know there are hundreds that I am not familiar with, so English is the default language that I use to communicate with foreign clients. Though every client I’ve worked with has at least some familiarity with English, a few of them weren’t fluent enough to express clear instructions. When this happens I just look for solutions that will help us communicate better.

My first approach is usually to confirm and repeat the client’s instructions. If I receive an email with a list of tasks the client wants me to do, I send an itemized reply to confirm that I have understood everything correctly. This is good practice even without a language barrier, since it lessens the risk for misunderstandings.

It also helps to encourage clients to express themselves naturally. For business communication most people feel that they must speak formally, sometimes to the extent of sacrificing clarity. If this is the case with your client, encourage him or her to speak conversationally and not worry too much about “sounding professional”.

Online translation tools can come in handy if your client has a hard time translating a phrase or idea into English. Ask your client to express the thought in his or her native language, then use translation tools like Google Translate and Babel Fish. Keep in mind that with these tools the results might not be accurate. For a better translation, you can ask around in foreign language forums or even visit the language section of Yahoo Answers. Just make sure you receive more than one answer to check for accuracy.

Still, these solutions might not be enough in some cases. Once, I had a client who had trouble with expressing negations. When she would say something like “write a list” she actually meant “do not write a list”. When I realized this problem, I would include graphics in my confirmation emails. I attached check marks for the things I would do and a cross beside any item I would not do. This taught me that it can be more helpful to use visual cues that substitute or complement your discussions.

But if communication becomes truly difficult and a do-it-yourself approach is no longer good for the project, it’s worth considering hiring a translator.

The Cultural Gap

Since what we have with clients is a business relationship rather than a personal one, it may seem like cultural differences won’t matter. But there are cases where there’s a difference in professional culture. The way you approach meetings, calls, and projects, may be a bit different from what they are expecting, and vice versa.

This was what happened to my WWD colleague Pamela when she worked on a startup project in France, which she wrote about in a previous article. Basically, she discovered that her definition of a vacation was different from theirs.

The solution to this is to begin your working relationship with a discussion on your preferred work process. How often do you need to report to the client? Should you be available for support at certain hours of the day? Will any of their holidays fall within the dates of your project? Formalize your work process by coming up with a project milestone sheet together. Discussing your concerns and committing to tasks in writing will help you both adjust your expectations before the work has begun.

Have you worked with clients whose language and culture are different from yours? What was your experience?

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The new version, released to coincide with Macworld earlier this month, includes a number of new features that really up the ante in terms of Mac integration. It’s a significant enough release that I’m giving Postbox another go as my primary email client, since I still have an emotionally draining relationship with Apple Mail and would love to kick that habit once and for all.

Address Book

Maybe most useful among the new features, at least for those coming over from Mail, and most definitely for MobileMe subscribers, is the new Address Book app integration. By default, the new 1.1.1 release of Postbox for Mac will use your Address Book contacts instead of creating its own database. You can opt to turn this feature off if for some reason you’d rather keep things separate. Any new contacts you create from within Postbox will also create new Address Book cards for those individuals, so it works both ways.

Spotlight Search

Also important for people making the jump from Mail is complete Spotlight access to all of your Postbox-stored mail. Message bodies, header info and attachment names will all now show up as hits when searching using Spotlight (as long as it’s enabled in Postbox. You have to turn this feature on, since it’s off by default). Spotlight integration is also a two-way street, since you can now right-click on any highlighted word in any email and select “Search in Spotlight” from the contextual menu to run a search.

iCal

iCal integration is now a two-way street in this latest release, too. Meeting notifications will automatically be sent in the background, and choosing “Mail Event” from the right-click menu in iCal should open a new Postbox message, so long as you’ve set the app as your default email client. Mail.app may still open too, but if this happens, Postbox has a quick fix to ensure things work properly the next time:

• Within the Finder, right-click on the iCal icon and then select Show Package Contents.
• Navigate to the “Contents” folder, then the “Resources” folder. Right-click on the folder called “Scripts” and select “Get Info.”
• Expand the “Sharing & Permissions” box and click the Lock icon in the lower right-hand corner to unlock this setting. Change any permissions that are listed as “Read Only” to “Read & Write.”
• Restart Postbox.

iPhoto

Something I always really liked about Postbox was its easy to use, built-in content filters that would allow you to see all your images, links and attachments at a glance with a single mouse click. The Postbox developerss have taken that functionality a step further with this new version, allowing you to export any image attachments in your mailbox directly to iPhoto. You’ll need to go through the somewhat lengthy process of completely indexing your inbox before you can do this, but it’s a really nice little feature that’s well worth the wait, especially if you have a lot of shutter-happy relatives and friends, as I do.

Many Other Improvements

There’s lots of little additions and under the hood improvements in version 1.1.1 of Postbox, too. One of the better ones is the ability to drag any icon to the Postbox icon in the dock and have it automatically create a new email with that file as an attachment. It’s a small thing, but it’s also indicative of the kinds of refinements put into this version aimed at making it more than a match for its native Apple competitor, and for other popular options like Mozilla Thunderbird, too. Postbox is free to try for 30 days, so give it a shot, especially if you’re a Mac user who’s had enough of Mail.

Are you a Postbox user? What do you think of the new version?

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The trick with time tracking is arriving upon a degree of detail that’s both useful and efficient. It doesn’t help you if keeping track of things is all you end up doing because it’s such a time and attention-intensive process. Conversely, a general account of “Peformed project-related work” for a time block of eight hours isn’t particularly illuminating, either for the client or yourself. So how granular should your time tracking and reporting be?

I worked with one company that insisted on providing time reporting for all project staff in 15-minute increments to all of its clients. It might seem impossible, and in practice, it was, though that didn’t change the wording of the guidelines. What ended up happening was that either the client would demand simpler reporting, or company assets on assignment would “go native” and refuse to submit such ridiculously extensive accounting of their time.

Over time, the most sensible way of going about time tracking for the company became apparent. Generally speaking, project staff would report changes in activity throughout the day in blocks of time of no less than half an hour, and no more than three. Then before passing on said info to the client, administrative staff would edit it, depending on the needs and wants of the particular client stakeholder receiving the report.

As a web worker working on a contract basis from home, your process should be similar. The easy part is knowing to what degree of detail you need for your own purposes of professional development: experience will tell you that. Determining what a client wants is trickier, but should follow a similar logic. Arrive at a standard first through trial and error with some early projects, and then use that as the template for all future engagements. Solicit and pay attention to client feedback after that to determine what’s right for the person you’re currently working with.

As with most things, the best way to go about it is to avoid extremes. Report too much or too little, and you’re likely to either over- or underwhelm a client. The perfect balance is hard to achieve, but a good balance shouldn’t be too hard to arrive at.

How do you determine how granular to make your time tracking?

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Luckily, Facebook recently opened up its API to allow third-party developers more access to core features, which gives them a chance to rework the web app and deliver something a little easier on the eyes and potentially less frustrating. That’s exactly what Microsoft’s done with its new Silverlight 4 Beta Client for Facebook, available for Windows and Mac. It’s also demonstrated that Microsoft can sometimes make something I actually like.

As you can see from the screenshots below, the Silverlight Facebook client does something visually striking with the content it pulls from Facebook itself. It uses a fairly sparse dark theme with big, easy-to-read type that borrows just enough from the standard web-based Facebook layout that you won’t find yourself hunting for commands and interface elements.

Your main view shows your news feed (the live feed, not the “News Feed,” which is completely useless and should not be the default for any reason). You can filter your news feed results using the same filters you’d find on Facebook.com, which appear down the left-hand side. Commenting and “liking” is enabled in the news feed, and you can post status updates by clicking the “what’s on your mind?” link at the top. Clickable selections from your friends’ photo updates appear slightly blurred on the right-hand side, providing even more functionality.You can also switch to either “grid” or “photos feed” modes. Grid displays your news feed in a columnar view, so that you can see more at once. Photos feed brings the partially-obscured photos backdrop to the fore and displays a mosaic of your friends’ recently uploaded images. It’s quite nice looking, and it provides a way of looking through your contacts’ images that’s far more appealing than Facebook’s standard method.

The photo browsing in general is very cool, and it feels much better checking out albums than it does on the web. The only downside I’ve found is that some albums, for whatever reason, aren’t browsable in the app, because of some setting the uploader has used in creating them.

What really puts this client over the top, in my opinion, is that it gives you access to both Events and your messages. Thanks to the inclusion of both of those features, I no longer have to visit the web-based Facebook at all. You won’t be able to use Facebook chat through the Silverlight app, but there are other solutions for that, too, including some web-based clients and multi-client apps like Beejive for the iPhone (which is what I use).

Other limitations include some control issues –you have to click on a column’s arrows to scroll, instead of using a mouse wheel, for example. This may be a limitation of Silverlight itself, or it could just be because the client is still in an early beta stage at this point, but it does get a bit annoying. You also can’t hide things you don’t want to see without visiting the Facebook web site, and some types of links will take you back to the web, though I didn’t encounter this very often because those are mostly Facebook app links, which I don’t generally use anyway. There are also some obvious bugs, but again, this is an early beta.

By far the most useful aspect of the Silverlight Facebook client is how it treats Facebook more like a CRM system and less like something to use for idle distraction. For example, whenever you view messages between yourself and someone else, it populates the right-hand side of the app with the latest updates, links and photos posted by that person. That way you can refer directly to that contact’s recent activity. It isn’t providing you with any information you can’t get on the web site, but it is combining and presenting it in much more useful ways.

It’s a solid Facebook client, and it makes the service feel much more professional. If you use Facebook during the course of your work, and you aren’t happy with how it works on the web, the Silverlight Client is definitely worth checking out.

Post your thoughts on the Silverlight 4 Beta Client for Facebook below.

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In this post, I’m going to list the standard things I provide every client. If any of these elements are missing, I find that someone walks away dissatisfied, be it the client or me. When present, they seem to allow things to progress fairly smoothly, although, as we all know, there’s no such thing as a sure thing.

Contract Document

Get it on paper. This is something I can’t stress enough, and something which still gets forgotten or overlooked so often it makes me doubt our capacity for learning as a species. If you need any evidence about the necessity of a contract document, look no further than the recent kerfuffle between TechCrunch and Fusion Garage over the CrunchPad/JooJoo device.

You don’t have to spend hours putting together a huge and complex contract before you start doing any work. At one firm I used to work with, we would issue proposals that included an abbreviated contract component. It wasn’t much, and it didn’t require a massive amount of time upfront when we weren’t yet getting paid, but it did ensure that clients felt the agreement was strong, and protected the interests of all parties.

Simple Mission/Objective Statement

The key to the document I’m talking about in this section is that it be simple. Make sure that you can express in plain language what it is the project is meant to achieve. Ensure that both you and your client agree on the wording, and agree on what it means before you set it in stone.

It will also help if this statement details a specific product or project endpoint that’s measurable. Otherwise, you might run into problems with an unknown quantity or an ambiguous endpoint that could result in a contract that drags on to a point where it isn’t really profitable for you to work on it any further.

Scheduled Check-Ins

Just like your significant other, your client is going to want you to check-in once in a while to make sure everything is still OK. It can become quite annoying, depending on the client, though you should always remember that the client is risking money on you as a contractor, so progress updates really are their due.

However, you can make it easier on yourself. At project outset, set up a regular schedule for progress updates, and hopefully that will curtail some of the unnecessary looking over the shoulder clients tend to do. It will also give you mini-goals to work towards between your larger milestones or deliverables, which should keep you on target.

Scope Change Documents

This isn’t strictly always necessary, but if it looks like the scope of the project is going to change, then it’s a definite must-have. I have a template of this type of document ready to go at project outset, in fact, because I end up using it so often, even though it only comes into play when the project you find yourself doing deviates from the one you set out to do.

As soon as you anticipate having to do more or different work than you and the client had agreed upon, the best thing for all involved is to provide them with a scope change document for approval before proceeding, unless you absolutely know that you have free reign. You’ll be protecting yourself from a whole heap of trouble, believe me.

Needs and Wants

Not every client will want all of the things I’ve listed here. In fact, a good many of them may try to talk you out of some of these. The fact remains that I think they’re necessities, and most clients will, too, once you actually use them. In the end, it’s all about making sure everyone involved gets what they want out of a project, not just what they think they want.

Do you agree with this list? Is there anything missing?

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Seesmic apparently saw the wisdom in that idea, because it recently revealed a new Windows-only Twitter client that doesn’t require AIR to run. I jumped at the chance to take the software, which is currently only available as a preview edition, for a test run.

Feature-rich

Seesmic for Windows has just about every bell and whistle I could ask for in a professional Twitter client, but without a lot of the unnecessary frills that I feel get thrown in with something like TweetDeck. It seems closer to Tweetie for Mac, which is still my favorite client, independent of platform concerns.

You can use multiple accounts, and customize your columns in the main window however you like. By default, your Home feed will display tweets from all the accounts you have registered with Seesmic, which is a great thing for people who use different Twitter accounts to organize the people they follow, like groups. For those who don’t, Seesmic includes support for Twitter lists, so that you can organize those you follow that way instead.

My personal favorite feature of Seesmic is how the compose window uses your first-entered account by default. That means regardless of what post I reply to, and in what stream I find it, the reply originates from my main account. This is ideal for me because it’s my primary publishing identity, while the others are mostly for monitoring.

Searches can be initiated at any time using a field intuitively placed at the top right-hand corner of the Seesmic window, but I couldn’t find any way to find trending topics. While I don’t generally have cause to check the trends, not having the ability to do so does rankle a bit.

Good-looking and Functional

This is the best-looking Twitter app I’ve seen on Windows, and possibly one of the best-looking Windows apps I’ve seen, period. Especially using a dark-tinted Windows 7 glass visual theme, it just looks designed to fit its surroundings, which is more than I can say for any AIR application.

The tabbed sidebar and light-colored stream backgrounds make it a very usable interface, in addition to helping with aesthetic effect. I would appreciate an option to turn on color-coding for @ mentions or conversations between two people you follow, but with columns designed for the purpose, I guess the Seesmic team figures that isn’t necessary.

Advanced controls for each tweet can be brought up by hovering over a user’s portrait, or by right-clicking on any individual post, so you have options in terms of replying or retweeting. You can also create user lists on the fly from anyone in your stream, or add people to existing lists, which makes it very easy to create functional groups quickly. You can even drag a user’s profile pic to the group of your choice to add them to it.

If there was a feature I’m missing most with Seesmic, it’s the ability to follow/unfollow people from within the client. It’s something I use regularly with my iPhone Twitter clients, and something I enjoy being able to do at a moment’s notice without visiting the web-based interface for Twitter.com.

Client of Choice for Windows

I won’t mince words: Seesmic’s dedicated Windows app has become my go-to software for using Twitter on a PC, even though bugs are present in the preview version. It’s just that good, and it’s not Adobe AIR. In fact, it might be reason enough for me to spend a little less time in OS X, and a little more time working in Windows 7. I’ll stress the might in that last statement, though. If you want a copy, for now you have to sign up for the Seesmic newsletter at Seesmic.com, but turnaround time for a download link seems to be less than a day for most.

Have you tried Seesmic for Windows? Let us know what you think of it below.

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Twitt is a new, lightweight Mac Twitter client that has some interesting features I haven’t yet found elsewhere. Can it compete with perennial favorites Tweetie and TweetDeck, though? Using both those programs regularly has set my expectations fairly high, but Twitt definitely counts some surprising twists among its repertoire.

Good Things

Twitt displays your Twitter stream like an iChat conversation. It’s an interface that’s familiar to Mac users, and it fully supports themes, including user-generated ones. It comes with two, the default iChat style and an iPhone theme that is much darker. I still prefer the look of Tweetie overall, but having options is always nice, and some users will value it over other UI considerations.

I also like that there’s a compose window at the bottom, which you can optionally hide. It’s preferable to me to always have a field for posting in view, since I find it actually makes me much more likely to actually tweet on a regular basis, something which I find myself doing less and less of since I started using Tweetie as my main Twitter workhorse.

Filters is another thing Twitt has going for it. The app allows you, via a preference panel, to specify terms that Twitt will then look for in your stream. It’ll then automatically hide tweets containing said keywords, effectively enabling you to filter out annoying trending topics or ongoing conversations you aren’t particularly interested in.

Not So Good Things

I’m hesitant to say “bad things,” because none of Twitt’s features are set in stone, and these can still be changed in later editions, but as it stands, there are a few failings the program has mean I won’t be changing horses anytime soon.

First of all, Twitt only supports one account at a time. That’s good news for people who want to keep things simple, I suppose, but if you have more than one Twitter account to monitor or manage, you’re out of luck with Twitt. For my line of work, that’s a dealbreaker. You can log out of your current account and sign in with another easy enough, but why bother when other clients offer much simpler account switching mechanisms.

Second, there isn’t any mechanism for in-line viewing of conversations that I can find. Nor is there a means to view profiles, follow, or do any of the other fun stuff that I’ve come to expect after using Tweetie and TweetDeck for so long. Without these features, I’m afraid Twitt will remain little more than a quaint alternative for Twitter amateurs, instead of a fully-fledged professional tool.

Conclusion

If you’re using Twitter as more of an IM client and less of an RSS replacement and/or brand management outlet, then there’s definitely something to be said for Twitt’s simplistic approach. Things work as you’d expect them to in an IM client. Clicking on someone’s portrait enters their username into the compose field, so that you’re automatically having a conversation with that person. Ongoing conversations between others are highlighted (orange, by default) and stand out from the rest of your stream.

For my purposes, and I suspect for a lot of other web workers, Twitt just isn’t powerful enough to play with the big boys. But it does have the advantage of being free and easy to learn if you’re just starting out. Once you get your sea legs, however, I highly recommend stepping up to Tweetie or TweetDeck.

Which desktop Twitter client are you using, and why?

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When Aliza originally reviewed the software, it was free beta release software. Now that it’s reached version 1.0, it comes with a $39.95 price tag for registration. Users can still download a free trial, so you can take Postbox through its paces before deciding to make a purchase.

I tried Postbox back when it was still in beta, right around the time Aliza originally reviewed it, and there are some definite improvements in the 1.0 release.

Better Search

One of Postbox’s main selling points is its advanced search capabilities. In Aliza’s original review, she talked about how you can search for all emails within a certain time period, or search for attachments and links within emails. Postbox also now boasts a number of search operators usable without opening the advanced settings panel, including “from:name” and “subject:keyword” if you prefer doing things all from one window.

Search and email indexing is also much faster than it used to be. Even with a large archive of messages, many of which are heavy on images and links, it took almost no time at all to download and make available my entire MobileMe archive; much less time than Mail takes to perform the same task.

More Add-ons

Add-ons like Lightning for Postbox, which brings your calendar into your Postbox window via a new tab, are a big part of the program’s appeal. There are utilities for Google Calendar access, message import/export, to-do lists, backup services, Growl notifications, and managing multiple identities on a single account. More are being developed every day, so expect the list to continue to grow.

One of my favorite Postbox-compatible plugins is ThunderBrowse, which allows you to view web pages directly in the application, without having to switch over to your browser of choice: great for digging in and really trying to conquer your inbox during a marathon session.

Easier

It’s hard to put my finger on exactly what usability changes occurred between earlier betas and this final release, but in general things seem redesigned with greater ease in mind. One great example is the ability to drag and drop email messages across accounts in the sidebar. It’s great for keeping your inboxes organized according to how you want to respond to messages, instead of according to how misinformed senders might try to reach you.

Postbox’s already impressive Conversations view for threaded viewing of replies also got easier, with on-the-fly notification of updates sent while you’re reviewing. That way, if someone sends an email continuing a conversation you’re currently reading, you need only click a button to view the latest response.

A Lot More Social

Maybe the biggest change since Aliza’s early experience with Postbox is the addition of multiple social network support. Postbox users can now sign in to their Facebook, FriendFeed and Twitter accounts via the application’s web services menu.

Doing so will not only allow you to post new status updates to those services via Postbox, it will also enable profile photo matching in the links/additional info sidebar to the right of the message reading window. If, for example, you get a DM from someone, Postbox will automatically retrieve that person’s current Twitter profile pic and display it. Messages you receive directly from contacts you also have on Facebook or Twitter will likewise display their profile pic from those services, though I’m not sure which takes precedence in the case of double matches.

For Aliza, the problem with switching to Postbox was that she had become so used to Gmail that learning a different system seemed like re-inventing the wheel. For me, it was that the early betas were actually fairly buggy, and just didn’t feel like something that could be a full-time solution for what is a core tool in my web working arsenal. This final version seems much, much more capable, and will definitely see full-time service on my Windows 7 machine. Will it replace Mail.app? As Aliza pointed out, old habits die hard, so we’ll have to see if I can avoid a relapse.

Let us know your thoughts on Postbox in the comments.

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