I’ve been having some issues with Apple Mail app on my 2019 MacBook Pro that I believe are mostly related to gmail. Mail has been ripping through my battery, depleting it in about an hour! So to that end, I decided to switch clients, from Apple Mail to Airmail 4. Unfortunately, Airmail 4 is pretty damned buggy, though I do like the feature set.
So now I’m looking for recommendations for other email clients for my 4 iCloud, 1 Yahoo, 2 Google, 1 Microsoft Outlook, and 1 personal server email accounts.
I’ve heard that people like Spark, but years ago when I tried it, it wasn’t for me. I’ve also heard about Mailmate, but don’t know much about it. It would be great if there was also an iOS client as well.
What’s your favorite Mac email client? What do you love & hate about it?
@bowline. Yep, I’d read many of those before I posted. Most are several months to several years old, so I’m hoping to get some more contemporary thoughts and opinions, as applications are updated, go subscription or completely fall off the face of the earth.
Edison Mail is one of them, but I would recommend against it due to a number of privacy scandals.
My personal recommendation would have to be Mozilla Thunderbird. It is completely free and open-source, not to mention that it has a focus on privacy (like Mozilla Firefox). If you end up liking it, you should really consider donating. Mozilla no longer funds it for a number of reasons, so the Thunderbird team relies on donations from the community to keep it going. There’s also a beta channel and a nightly channel of Thunderbird.
Here’s a list of notable features in Thunderbird (newsfeed, chat, calendar, task list, features built for macOS power users, etc).
In total, there are only 13 employees on the Thunderbird team, not to mention that there’s a tightly knit community.
I second @Justin_Vega 's Thunderbird recommendation. Apple Mail was our first choice for Mac users, but when Apple released a flaky version of Mail.app (or a buggy update) we could alway count on Thunderbird.
I’m using both. MailMate can use SpamSieve, so I leave them running in the background, and use Spark for reading email. Sometimes I jump back into Mailmate for something.
I’m really dissatisfied. If Spark could use SpamSieve, that probably would be my choice. I’m going to look at Thunderbird and see if SpamSieve is a possibility, how ugly it is, etc.
Why are you using both? Just so that MailMate can filter your spam with SpamSieve?
Thunderbird has the ability to install a plugin for SpamSieve, which is very enticing for me, as like you, I like to leave a mail app up and running on my iMac to filter my spam.
Is Thunderbird’s future tied to Mozilla/Firefox’s future? If so, I’d be afraid that it lives only at the whims of Google deciding to keep Mozilla/Firefox alive.
I’ve tried Thunderbird and didn’t like it, but to each their own.
