539: Back to Email

Thanks, @ismh. I’m glad to hear MM will get some discussion next week!

It was a good idea I thought. Really good though I would be careful not to overdo it and lose the dialogue chatty feel.

I think it is good for you guys to experiment with the format to be honest. You and David are not Katie and David and the dynamic and flow is different now. Mac and ios is different too and times change. I would say to you though to try ‘vox populi’ sometimes in the person of some mid level or even low level user. As opposed that is to power users of Rosemary’s high level. Actually Automators podcast and so on on is now beyond me. Partly because it is beyond my needs and I count myself as a power user and do automate stuff but not at this level.

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Once I found MailMate, I stopped looking for new email apps on Mac. Downloading Preside now…looks like MailMate for iOS! Really interesting…

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Long time user of MailMate. Its just powerful in everything you throw at it. I downloaded Preside for iOS. Something did not appeal to me. The interface is too archaic. Is not compact in presentation. The Gmail App is very well presented. May be I am not using the correct display settings. I wonder
:thinking:

Yeah, it’s pretty old-looking. (Anyone know if the “premium” themes change this at all, or are they just different color variations with the same look?)

I personally don’t like spending much time in email on my phone. When I do get in there, I really just want to be able to move some stuff around to where it needs to go at times when I can’t get to my Mac. Mail for iOS was prety worthless in that regard, especially after having worked to customize Mailmate on the Mac. So even if Preside is ugly, it’s worth it to me because it basically seems like it will serve as an iOS extension of Mailmate.

I second this. I understand that getting Rosemary and Myke is simpler, and in fact, that could be viewed as an advantage of being part of the Relay.fm network – lots of good contributors to pull into the show. At the same time, I value MPU for introducing me to new ways of approaching problems.

If you continue this mini-interview concept (and I think it’s a good idea), I would encourage you to mine this forum for people who are doing interesting stuff with their Apple technology but aren’t already talking about those solutions on Relay.fm or other podcasts.

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That’s what I thought too until I found the (almost) excessive Appearance tab. You can customize it to make it look almost like Mail for iOS…or go as nutty as you want. It’s amazing.

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Sweet. I kind of like it looking ugly. It reminds me I’m not supposed to be futzing around in my email unless absolutely necessary. :wink:

Currently I’m using Apple Mail after previously being a Spark user. Lately it’s been struggling with emails not updating on the iPhone but updates on the iPad. Reinstalling it on my iPhone to see if that helps. Something I do like about Apple Mail is the ability to sort by subject and sender. When I’m plowing through emails it makes things rather simple in selecting a group to archive. In years past I’ve been rather hung up on getting to Inbox Zero but now I’m more relaxed about it and just have the emails I’m still processing or have something to do on it sitting in my inbox. Previous to Spark I used Mailbox until it got acquired.

The thing I like about Spark is the snoozing features, adding/using a different signature is simple, and scheduling emails to send later too.

Edit: I just signed into Spark again and it seems to be fine now. Might still use Apple Mail in certain contexts and might go between the two. Really like being able to sort by sender and subject in Apple Mail for Mac.

I only use Outlook because my work does not allow any other email client to access our Office 365 email. I don’t mind it on iOS. Outlook on Mac has pretty great Exchange calendar integration with Teams and Skype for Business, but it is a terrible email client. It cannot find messages in the search results that I can see in the inbox before I start searching for them.
The new (beta) version has much better search but lacks a bunch of other features.

I really wish I could still use Apple Mail to get my office 365 email, but as of Catalina 10.4, Mail respects the security policies that my company has in place. I tested Mail on Mojave again, and it still works with my Office 365 account. I am so tempted to roll back to Mojave.

An item I think is important and was missed is that Exchange (in either outlook.com or an O365 subscription) has server-side rules that (from my perspective) are at least as powerful as those on the Google platform. So, it’s an option for people who want/need server-side rules and don’t want the Google ick factor. Many tools (including Mac Mail) support the Exchange native protocol (which is not IMAP) and Exchange does provide an IMAP option. I find it useful enough that my personal domain email is managed through a couple of O365 subscriptions.

Side note: for Mac Mail, the feature that keeps me there is that I have mine configured so that any time an email address is not someuser@mycompanyname.com, the email address gets flagged in red. That’s saved me multiple times from inadvertently sending something to either an incorrect autocomplete or a business colleague’s personal email address.

I wanted to quibble with this take, but then you said iOS and I had to face the reality that, despite Spark sitting right there on my homescreen and my partiality toward its design, Outlook is the only email app I can say I truly use daily.

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The themes are mainly colour changes, but you can change the layout of the app. For instance, on my iPad I have a series of ‘tabs’ across the top that show my most used folders. The sidebar shows me the emails in a list, then the right 2/3rds shows the content. Basically it looks like Mail.app on the Mac.

Because Preside has so many settings, it does take a fair amount of fiddling and customisation to make it work and look best for you.

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I appreciated the mini-interviews. Because the “best” email app for someone depends so strongly on personal preference hearing about long-term experiences from dedicated users of different email apps is particularly useful.

I think that I’ve been talked into trying Airmail again.

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I liked the episode. I was using Airmail but my mail kept getting stuck in my drafts folder so I switched back to Spark which I’m happy with (especially the lack of subscription :wink: )

The interview was with users was a nice feature hope they bring that back for other app types (calendars, task managers, etc.)

Were e-mail filtering and rules discussed? (Sorry if I missed it.)

I recently set up a bunch of filters that divert routine e-mails that require non-urgent acknowledgement into a folder, bypassing the inbox, so that the inbox generally contains novel communications that need a bit of thought.

For example, Amazon order confirmations, PayPal and other payment receipts, newsletters (that I want to stay subscribed to).

I think it’s best to do this on the server side—i.e. in the provider’s webmail interface. iCloud’s filtering capabilities are very limited. ProtonMail’s are much better. And the beta web interface is very nice.

I use the Mac Mail app and have a couple issues with my rules. Unless I have it set up to process immediately the rules never seem to process unless I tell apply rules to the individual email.

My example of this is my wife and I have a joint account which mostly gets our neighborhood emails (think old school email distro lists). As a way to make the inbox not become unbearable I created a rule to archive emails after a week sent to these. The problem is that it never seems to run after I tell it apply the rule on the inbox upon initial creation. Is there a setting to make sure that the inbox is constantly having the rules applied to it to ensure things like this are run once an email is older than 1 day as the rule states

Thanks for the tip about Preside. I’ve just spent some time having a quick play around with the app and I really like the way it works.

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Rather than just rehashing what email apps are out there, how about diving into real world use cases for email, such as transferring sensitive files via email? I have this issue and haven’t found any apps I can use successfully. Windows seems to have more options - I have used a couple at my day job - such as SafeSend.

I used to use Sharefile.com but it is quite pricey.

Managing email servers was one of my duties for many years. The only way I would send sensitive files by email is to use encryption. And as you may know that usually requires software to be installed by all parties, and key exchange prior to sending. Which has lead most business to use a service like SafeSend.

https://gnupg.org/