gmailmacmail.app
All,
I have Gmail and I'm currently using the Sparrow application, but I wanted to see if Mail.app was able to handle what I need.
1) Archive AND delete functionality side by side. – Yes, I archive some things I want to search later and delete other things. Last time I checked, it was only one or the other.
2) Labels
Basically, (almost) everything that is available in the web interface.
Under Accounts in Preferences, there's a field there called "Email Address:". You can put a comma-separated list of addresses in there, like this:
Now your "Compose" window will have a "From" popup menu that lets you choose your sending address:
AFAIK, this works for pretty much any mail account type, as long as your mail provider allows you to muck around with the From: header.
Keyboard shortcuts: Mail has it's own keyboard shortcuts, which you may have to learn.
Alternate email addresses/multiple accounts: works fine. Don't know about plus-addresses.
Priority inbox: this is not supported. Labels work, as does flagging. Public calendars work in iCal.
Syncing is very easy to set up - via IMAP in Mail, and in Preferences in iCal. In Lion it's even simpler.
Yes, you add each account separately in mail. You can still visit them in any browser or device.
Best Answer
Actually Mail 5 (i.e. on Lion) handles Gmail much better than on previous cats.
1) There's both Archive and Delete buttons. I think the Archive button isn't visible by default. Right-click (or control-click) the toolbar to "Customize Toolbar..." and you should see the Archive button. Drag it up to your toolbar.
2) @adam-rice is correct that there's no direct analog for Labels in Mail. They are remapped to folders. If you just pretend Folders are Labels this does work pretty well. Mail does download a copy of a message for each folder/label it resides in. On previous versions of Mail this would clog up some inboxes/folders with the multiple copies. Mail 5 now recognizes and hides duplicates, though; it seems specifically designed to handle Gmail labels. In Mail's beautiful threaded conversation view you'll just see the one copy of each message, though you will see a note that it has duplicates.
With Mail 5 you can get pretty close to what you can do in the web interface. You might need to remap some keyboard shortcuts. Let Gmail's server do a lot of the heavy lifting. Go to Gmail settings>> Labels tab and check or uncheck the "show in imap" box for some inboxes/labels you don't want to see in Mail. I turn off the "All Mail" inbox and basically archive my emails out of Mail.app and keep them on the server. I also uncheck the spam inbox. Check the "important" inbox to recreate the priority inbox back in Mail.