I send most ad hoc files and credentials with FF Send and a simple password. It’s not very enterprisey (some of those SafeSend features look really useful) but it’s an easy tool to teach people to use.
I work in a school and digital safeguarding is an issue we constantly deal with. We use Office 365 at work so we share sensitive files using OneDrive. If the file is shared between someone at another school in our trust then we can find that person in the sharing options and only allow them access. If it is with someone outside of the school/trust we can create a sharing link and, if needed, add a password. We then send the link and the password in separate messages.
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On the topic of innovation in email, Fastmail is working on the next version of IMAP, which they are called JMAP:
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David mentioned a way to get a link for a specific email that you could use elsewhere to easily open that email. I thought it was going to be included in the notes on the episode, but I can’t find it. Does anyhow have information on this?
Sharefile and SmartVault are popular among accountants. Safesend is so nice because it has an Outlook add on that works so well. I just wish I could find a Mac clone that works that easy.
Thanks. I don’t usually use Firefox but I will look at that one.
I use a ton of filters in Gmail but I would like to move away from it because of privacy concerns.
I just noticed that /usr/bin/mail is still around. I used this for mail for most of the 1980’s starting on Unix (timeshared) systems. Don’t really know how one can use it this day and age, but it’s still there.
On Airmail - I had real issues with it last weekend. Basic functionality worked well and the OmniFocus integration did as well.
I agree with David Sparks, don’t like the way they do email links…
What didn’t work well, and caused me to abandon, was rules syncing. I heavily use groups in contacts. I’m forced to use O365 for work. In Mail.app, I use smart folders to looking for those groups and just a couple of rules to file into triage folders (know and unknown senders)
With Airmail, since smart folders don’t support groups in contacts, I tried to label things with rules and then use the smart folders on the labels.
It was a disaster, the way airmail’s rules looked into contacts was different between different Macs and the rules constantly scrambled.
So for my work machine(s) - I abandoned Airmail…
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This was a good episode but I think Fastmail got short shrift.
It supports push on Apple Mail on iOS (using some nonstandard interface that involved some behind-the-scenes work between Fastmail and Apple). I am not aware of any other IMAP email systems that support push on iOS besides iCloud and, at one point, Yahoo. If you need to use Gmail in Apple Mail with an alias (which, see below, you shouldn’t), you need to set it as IMAP, which means you lose push.
Fastmail can serve as a client to third-party email services. All my work Gmail forwards to Fastmail, but when Fastmail sends email from my work Gmail address, it uses the Gmail SMTP servers directly; it does not use its own email servers with the Gmail address as an alias, which means the email doesn’t display as “Sent on behalf of” or get flagged as spam / fraud, etc. I don’t think this is unique to Fastmail, but I’ve found the way that Fastmail handles fully external email accounts to be great (however, I do think that forwarding to Fastmail, rather than having Fastmail check the external account on some schedule, is superior).
When you use a custom domain, you can send email directly “from” that domain, by using Fastmail to directly manage your MX records. This means you can put anti-spoofing information (SPF and DKIM) in your DNS, meaning that when you are sending email from Fastmail using your custom domain, it’s not an “alias,” Fastmail simply is the authorized service that email is sent from.
Just a mini rant: Aliases are the devil. Aliases in this context means one domain sending email with an unaffiliated domain in the “From” field, not multiple user names on one domain. These emails are just much more likely to be blocked or to alarm recipients—I had people think they were being phished when I used to use aliases on Gmail, given how Gmail displays alias emails in people’s inboxes. I’ve reached the point where I only advise people to use custom email domains if they do it properly, using servers that are the canonical authorized place that emails from the particular domain should be coming from, or setting the various email apps and services they use to use the proper external SMTP servers. A common thing I’ve seen is people getting an email address from Hover, having it forward to Gmail, and having Gmail use the Hover address as an alias but using Gmail’s SMTP servers. Emails sent this way are highly likely to be blocked or to confuse recipients.
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I also gave it another try but abandoned it within a few hours. For longer sensitive emails I like to select text and have it “read back” to me before sending. This helps me catch typos and gives me a better sense of the email’s tone.
This does not work in Airmail with a new email that has not yet been sent. It works on emails that are in the inbox or that have been sent but not on one not yet sent. Spark and Mail both work as intended.
I recovered an old hotmail account, I added it to Apple Mail and I have to say that I even get my emails faster than when using iCloud or of course gmail.
I have a question, we usually talk about multiple emails. At the moment I have 3 1 for Banks, Utilities, and Home stuff, I have another one for Social Network and gaming stuff, blogs (sorry this falls on that one) and 1 for things that I consider really really important password manager account, my backblazce account, iCloud Main account.
I am not sure which email does Airlines /Hotel companies due fall? Any ideas?
Luis
I don’t know if this is the solution David mentioned, but I have been using Hook, mentioned by Terpstra (drink)for this purpose and it’s made zero inbox a lot easier. If an email has a task associated with it that I can’t do right away, I use Hook to make a link which I copy to my task manager and then I can move the email into a folder, and when I’m ready the link opens the message.
I loved the mini interviews. Like David, I was tempted to try out Airmail again, as I had also abandoned it due to stability issues. My return was brief because it seems to suffer the same problem that stops me using Apple Mail.
When I archive or delete an email, that means ONLY that I have finished with the current email. It does not mean I want to view some other email. It’s the main reason I stuck with Spark initially, because it has a simple checkbox to control this behaviour. Now I dig Spark even more with recent changes, and will be sticking with it for the foreseeable future.
While I can understand that some people may want this behaviour of automatically opening the next email, I cannot understand why this isn’t configurable in so many prominent email clients.
The following AppleScript should do the trick. I can’t remember where I got it. I’ve modified it to work with Things 3. David may have posted this several years back or Brett Terpstra.
tell application "Mail"
--get selected messages
set theSelection to selection
--loop through all selected messages
repeat with theMessage in theSelection
--get information from message
--set theMessageDate to the date received of theMessage
--set theMessageSender to sender of theMessage
set theMessageSubject to the subject of the theMessage
set theFromName to (extract name from sender of theMessage)
set theTitle to theFromName & "-" & theMessageSubject
set theMessageContent to the content of theMessage
set theMessageId to the message id of theMessage
set theMessageSummary to (do shell script "echo " & quoted form of theMessageContent & " | fmt -p -s | head -15 | tee /tmp/t")
set theMessageURL_raw to "message://%3c" & theMessageId & "%3e"
set theMessageURL to "[url=" & theMessageURL_raw & "]" & theTitle & "[/url]"
--set theMessageURL to "x-postbox-message://" & theMessageId
--set theMessageURL to the URL of theMessage
--set body to "[url=" & theMessageURL & "]" & theMessageSubject & "[/url]" & linefeed & theMessageSummary
set body to theMessageURL & return & return & theMessageSummary
--make a short headerHello you just the voice
--set theHeader to the all headers of theMessage
--set theShortHeader to (paragraph 1 of theHeader & return & paragraph 2 of theHeader & return & paragraph 3 of theHeader & return & paragraph 4 of theHeader & return & return)
set the clipboard to theMessageURL
tell application "Things3"
show quick entry panel with properties {name:theMessageSubject, notes:body}
end tell
end repeat
end tellThe most important feature of email apps for me is far and away share sheet integration.
Thats why I dropped Spark and Outlook. They have awkward share sheet extensions that don‘t support all keyboard controls.
I send documents by mail from my iPad all the time.
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My reaction when they were saying that mail rules on the Mac should actually be in iCloud:
Overcast link at the time they talk about it:
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Just came here to say this exact same thing. Outlook is a solid option these days, testified by the App Store reviews. It’s constantly evolving too unlike Mail.
Microsoft’s development for apple platforms is light years ahead of Google’s and their general ignorance to iOS.
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Has anyone else tried Outlook on iOS’s “Play My Emails” function? Reads your unread emails out loud. I have a simple Shortcut so I can trigger it without even being in the app. Really great to catch up on my work email while getting a needed walk out of the house. My experience is it’s a lot better than native Mail/Shortcuts, but I could be wrong.
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