For awhile now, I've been using Apple's own Mail app for all my electronic mail tasks. Overall, I'm happy with the features -- but lately I've noticed an annoying sluggishness.

It appears that the longer I keep the application open, the slower and more unresponsive it becomes. The problem is solved by quitting, then restarting. After a restart, it's back to its peppy self. But aside from the annoyance of having to quit, it just seems like something must be wrong. I store a lot of mail in sub folders on my Mac. It's a POP account, and not IMAP. So I'm wondering if anyone else has experienced the same performance?

I had been watching Jon Hicks' comments regarding similar issues with Safari, which turned out to be a third-party plugin. No plugins involved here, but I'm guessing there's a fix out there somewhere.

FTP on OS X

In other Apple application-related thoughts, I've been a long-time user of RBrowser for all of my FTP and SFTP needs. I love many features, but am continually frustrated with the performance and lackluster updates.

I've briefly given Transmit a spin and found it to be much snappier, but it (seemed to) lack the things I like about RBRowser the most:

• OS X "column view" for navigating directories.
• Double-click to open files in BBEdit.

So I'm asking you, the highly esteemed readership of SimpleBits, to prove me wrong: does Transmit make you smile -- or are there better alternatives out there for FTP on a Mac?