I had issues as well with timeouts or other issues that made MailMate impractical with Office 365.
I feel the pain. I’ve been looking for something since Dropbox shut mailbox. I’m now using outlook since my university switched to office365 in December.
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Just know you are not alone. 
The search continues. I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for TBH but I keep on searching for it. I guess I’m looking for quick, clean, intuitive, easy to set up and customize.
I think I have at least 5+ email apps on each of my Mac and iPhone and rotate between them all depending on my mood.
Cross platform, I’ve settled on Spark for now however the simple interface of Edison draws me back as does Airmail and its litany of customizations. And don’t forget the iOS Outlook app, which while it has to deal with the baggage of being a Microsoft app (and the baggage of the MacOS/desktop version), is pretty solid.
As for Apple Mail, if I could get past my dislike for the iOS version of the app, I’d probably just use that everywhere and call it a day. There are some obvious enhancements the app needs across the board and here’s hoping they give it some love this year.
On MacOS only, I’ve recently been testing out Mimestream and it is quick, sleek and easy to use.
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I feel this pain, too.
I’ve decided to stick with Mail. This comes with the trade off of not really using my phone for email, but that’s not much of a trade off tbh because I don’t have the kind of relationship to email that needs quick responses like that. Also, I never go anywhere much these days anyway.
I moved over to iCloud w/a custom domain and I feel that Mail is trustworthy and beautiful and while I wish it was more intuitive for the power user, I value the privacy features more than those efficiencies.
I pair Mail with Sanebox and have some Smart Folders that mimic my favorite features of Hey. I use the blackhole liberally, in fact I do that instead of unsubscribe 90% of the time. I also use the unread filter to avoid having to process my sanelater and sanenews items.
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A few replies (and past discussions) have mentioned some very valid points that are worth resurfacing:
- Email itself is broken; as a protocol/format, it was not designed with modern day uses in mind; and
- My own approach to email is probably flawed, and I should fall in love with the annoying knocking sound1 and get on with it
I don’t disagree with these ideas. However, I submit to the floor that some recent apps have shown that there’s a lot more that can be done with email clients. A brief overview of some of the exciting things I’ve seen recently:
Airmail’s automation hooks
Airmail offers amazing customizability. On iOS especially, it is trivial to set up a swipe action that does any number of things with the swiped message/conversation, including using URL schemes to share data from them to e.g., Shortcuts. I use this to quickly add contacts to contact groups. I use server-side rules to then filter messages from those groups into particular inboxes.
Postbox’s Topics
Somehow Postbox’s implementation of Topics is the most elegant “tags” design I’ve seen in email. It is very clean, navigable, and easy to use.
Postbox’s composition goals
Postbox offers a simple time tracker for each message you compose. This is a neat way to try to get you to get into and out of email faster.
Hey’s Focus and Reply
I would love to have Hey’s Focus and Reply UX on other clients. It creates a clean, minimalist way of replying to a bunch of conversations in sequence.
Tempo’s Focus Mode
Very similar to Hey’s Focus and Reply, Tempo offered a Focus Mode that let you batch-process messages one at a time.
Image credit: TechCrunch
Hey’s Screener
The Screener was arguably the most popular feature from Hey. It makes sure that the messages that are most emphasized are part of real conversations that deserve your attention.
I have created a Screener-like UX with Airmail custom actions and Fastmail rules. It works, but Airmail’s kludgy nature makes it a little awkward.
Surely there are other email innovations that I haven’t captured above.
I guess it’s easy to complain about email. Really, there are some interesting things happening.
The trouble is that each client comes with brutal trade-offs. Airmail’s powerful, but untrustworthy (from a glitchy perspective, not a data/privacy one, IMO). A bunch of great clients are macOS-only. A bunch of great clients only work with certain services. And so on. From my perspective, “all I want” should be easy, but what we’re getting is a variety of exciting options that are incompatible with one another.
Damned competition. Maybe we should socialize email apps?
Alas, this thread was a good reminder of something: when I last reviewed my approach to email, I had a Mac Mini. My away-from-desk option was an iPad Pro. At the time, I tried a “let’s only use a Mac for email” philosophy, but was quickly limited by my Mac mini’s annoying lack of portability.
I haven’t revisited that idea since. Yet, now I have a laptop again. I may try uninstalling most email options from my iPad/iPhone and sticking to the Mac (and probably Postbox) once again…
^1:
(Dang. Can’t embed Apple Music iFrames. For shame.)
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+1 for Airmail even tho it is not new, with the bug fixes it feels that way.
I have been a long time complainer about Airmail, but the dev has cleaned up most of the annoyances and bugs. The imap push notification is still crap but the automation and sharing actions are fantastic.
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ryan
your devonthink actions in Airmail: do they save plain text or eml? universal link or airmail link? can you share some retail? thx?
I haven’t used them in a while —mostly I share airmail:// links these days.
But I can tell you that Airmail has a built-in DEVONthink integration, and that’s what those actions were built onto. The integration shares the contents of the email as a plain text file into the DEVONthink global inbox.
So far, Postbox’s setup has been the easiest I’ve encountered.
It detected the Exchange settings for my Uni account, set server names, ports, etc. All I had to do was with to OAuth2 (Office 365), and I was in business.
Same with my Dreamhost-hosted account that uses my own domain name. It detected the correct server settings, and all I had to do was click Ok.
Most impressive.
I watched all their videos, and I think Tags will be one of the killer features because they span folders, and include Sent, Archive, etc. So many mail programs assume you would only want to see messages you’ve received, and also in the folder you’re currently looking at (super lame).
Also - actions on email are a single keystroke! Why, Outlook, do I have to press ⌃E to archive a message when E wasn’t doing anything anyway?
So my impression of Postbox so far is it is made by people who use it themselves.
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Devonthink’s integration script of regular Mail is much superior to Airmail’s integration. If importing rich text/HTML emails with attachments in native format is desired, Mail is the best option at this point.
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I’m really digging Canary Mail, almost to the extent that it is THE mail application that I use daily… built-in encryption, mail tracking, they finally cleaned up some of the formatting issues… they need separate signature lines (I use text expander for the signatures), but otherwise, I kinda like it
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This is why I keep coming back to Mail. I can archive important email messages in Devonthink and clean them out of Mail altogether.
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What do you use on the backend?
Thanks for mentioning PostBox – I’ve been using it for the past couple days and I like it.
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TwoBird https://www.twobird.com/ both Mac and iPhone is my current driver.
From the folks at notability.
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I’m using Mailmate with three Office 365 without any problems. I had with the initial setup but after I filled in the correct server settings it worked.
If you have still problems just write benny, he is very helpful!
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I recall Apple introduced extensions for Mail, but I haven’t heard of any.
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I’ve tested a lot of Email clients on Mac and iOS recently because I had some hick ups with Apple’s Mail.app.
@Mail.app:
I loved Mail.app so far but if you are using more than iCloud standard IMAP addresses it is hit and miss if it will work. Mail is not good in handling everything Microsoft. But this isn’t Apple’s fault. Exchange or Microsoft IMAP is the worst. I don’t know who is working on Exchange but they don’t really care about anything outside of Microsoft at all. IMHO.
First they stripped away the possibility to choose your own default folders. Then they probably decided to hire some of the cheapest translators on this world because if English is not your native language you will probably have two archive, sent, spam folders or more. Because they don’t seem to use any standard at all Mail.app looks for a international “archive”, doesn’t find one and creates it. Microsoft, settings set to German language already has an “Archiv” folder. Lots of people are complaining about this. Not long ago you could simply fix this by pointing to the right folder in the settings. This isn’t possible anymore.
Now Microsoft decided to hardcode into their servers that every sent mail has to be saved onto the server. If you have any other client besides Mail.app or Outlook then every sent mail will be saved twice and they also stripped the possibility to disable this.
@Outlook:
A lot of people are suggesting using Outlook for Exchange. If you are on a Mac or on iOS I wouldn’t recommend it. Outlook is so inconsistent that on Windows, iOS and Mac they always feel like a completely different program. The search function is the worst on the market and especially the Mac version is subpar to anything else. It reminds me on flash apps.
Outlook on iOS was outsourced by Microsoft. A lot of people like it but it had privacy and security issues in the past.
@Airmail:
Using Airmail, for me, is like being in a candy store. There is so much going on. Too much. I prefer a more subtile look. And it isn’t as reliable as Mail.app.
@Spark:
I like Spark and I like Readdle apps in general. But Spark is collecting a lot of data. I haven’t a good feeling about this, no matter how much I trust them.
@Postbox:
I like Postbox. It works. It has a good documentation and it’s fast. It has the best implementation of tags. Postbox will work on Windows, it will work on Mac. But, as others have stated, it has no native app for Apple silicon. After two years. Even some single devs have working betas right now. They don’t answer mails or tweets about it since early 2021. I have a license since 2015 or so. They seem to get out a new version periodically every now and then, are super responsive for some time and then they go silent till they get out the next version.
@Mailmate:
This is the mail client I liked from the start. It just works. I would even say it is similar to Mail.app but without the bling and with a ton of functions under the hood. But instead of shoving them into your face like Airmail does, you have to learn them in the help file. Mailmate works fine with Microsoft accounts and it is a very polished and it is lightning fast, at least on my M1 Macbook Air.
It uses more RAM than Mail.app but way less battery. I really like it so far. Yes, there is no official release for over one year but it has just 1 dev and there are several betas over the last year. And the beta is running without a flaw. If you look at the bug reporting site, Benny is answering all questions, even in longer threads. I got a reply on my question by email within a day.
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Thanks! There are a few issues why I cannot use MailMate for some Office 365 accounts:
- Policies prevent the use of other applications apart from Outlook and Apple Mail. This is also the reason why Airmail won’t work;
- POP and IMAP are prevented from use by forcing policies;
- Using an app-password is disabled.
As far a I know it is impossible to workaround these issues unfortunately. I’m glad I was able to get approval to use Fantastical for my calendar, and I’m still glad they allow Apple Mail. I now mostly use the Outlook web client for work and use Apple Mail for personal, associations and foundations I work on in my personal time. I could use MailMate for everything but work e-mail, which I’m thinking about trying.
Is MailMate still actively developed and supported? Because after checking the website the latest version has been in Beta for a long time now.
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