I want to mange discussion threads en masse. By manage, I mean view, move to a folder, or delete. By discussion threads, I mean an entire set of incoming + outgoing messages associated with a conversation in email.
Do any of other the contenders mentioned so far (Thunderbird, Mailsmith, and Postbox) have this feature?
I am tired of hacking around with an “INBOX” and a “SENT” box. This paradigm no longer works well to track what I do with email.
I should add that I like Spark on my iOS devices, if only for the Smart Mailbox feature. I hesitate however to put Spark on my macOS without some further thought.
Between 2009 and 2018 seems like there was at least 2 or 3 times when we would start having email problems right after installing an upgrade/update. It would not affect everyone but 10 - 15% of our users would start experiencing similar problems. Sometimes it would be an intermittent connection problem, sometimes mail wouldn’t work at all.
In a few cases I was not able to resolve the user’s problem even after a clean install of the OS (i.e. re-image). Each time, however, installing Thunderbird allowed them to send/receive email and eventually their problem with mail.app “resolved itself”.
Was it a “flaky” version (or update) of Mail.app? I thought so.
Using Airmail everywhere. Has the best combination of OmniFocus integration (I use the old workflow of linking all emails to tasks, which I still think is the best for centralization) cross-platform and feature set (Undo send, snoozing, send later).
Would use Spark though if they would finally
Expose internal links to messages without going through clunky workarounds
Allow for sending emails to individual projects in OmniFocus instead of sending them all to the inbox (which is dumb).
Sometimes apps that don’t charge money cost you in other ways. I think free can be nice, especially for people on a limited budget, but it also isn’t a panacea.
I am sorry that Apple Mail is not working for you. Having tried most of the email clients mentioned here, I prefer Apple Mail to everything else. Is it worth trying to fix the Apple Mail and Gmail problem?
If Apple Mail consistently works for you then it should be a great choice.
Is it worth trying to fix the Gmail problem?
Apparently Apple doesn’t think so. When apps like Thunderbird can work perfectly with Gmail year after year, I cannot think of a technical reason Mail.app should have a problem.
I’m also kind of dissappointed with the current state of affairs regarding mail clients in OS X. I cannot find a software that covers all my needs, here’s my “shopping list”.
Turns out I am a heavy GMail user at work. I have hundreds of thousands of emails, and to make things a little bit more complicated, my email workflow uses GMail labels, with frequent messages having more than one label.
I also need keyboard autocomplete for moving messages to folders, as I have also hundreds of them.
Spark / Airmail are very feature complete, but I find their interface a little bit sluggish (like it was done with an Electron shell --which I know they are not), but just the feel of the interface interactions doesn’t feel very native to me. Also their screen layouts are not the best I like.
Mailmate - I have a license, and it’s a beast but recently I started having a lot of issues with GMail, like moving a message to another folder doesn’t remove the message from the GMail Inbox -which is killer when you try to read the email from my iPhone using the GMail app. Also, the mapping of IMAP folders and GMail labels seems very cumbersome and involves creating “tags” in Mailmate and the documentation seems very obscure. Also everytime I give a chance to using Mailmate, it takes forever to synchronize and GMail throttles the connection. I’d say Mailmate doesnt really work well with GMail just out of the box, which I find really strange as the app is awesome.
Mail.app - Feels the most “native” to me (as one could expect from a stock Apple application). But moving messages to a folder cannot be done with an autocomplete (Mail only has a keyboard shourtcut for a “predicted” folder). Combining Mail with the paid MsgFiler plugin makes things workable.
Thunderbird - Ticks all the requirements but the latest Thunderbird version broke some archiving plugin I was using and I’m waiting for the author to update the plugin. Also, the Lightning extension for Google Calendar was currently broke a couple of weeks ago. The interface is not the best either, but other than that, Thunderbird is nice. Integration with GMail is straightforward.
Postbox is the client I’m using now. It’s like Thunderbird on steroids and the killer feature for me is that it natively includes an archiving feature with autocomplete. Wish it had calendar integration.
Outlook - The Mac version I haven’t been able to syncronize with GMail correctly. Some messages in the Inbox would not appear :(.
And that’s the current state of affairs for my email setup on Mac. On the iPhone I just use the GMail app but then that app lacks also autocomplete for archiving. This is a glaring omission from the part of Google! Outlook is very nice on the iPhone.
The thing with MailMate is that you have to customize it to fit your workflow. If you use out of the box, you are missing on most of its power.
I live in smart folders. I use Sane Box to filter my mail to Inbox and other folders (Later, Waiting on Reply, News, Payments etc.) and subsequently use tags and rules to move it between folders (Important, Complete, Archive etc.). The only app that can almost 100 % copy this workflow on iOS is Preside so my workflow and results stay the same no matter the device I use.
But I use Gmail only for private stuff and I do not care how it looks like inside Gmail so long my smart folders are fine My advice is to think about your workflow and once you have its specifics down try to emulate it in MailMate. So far I was able to do almost anything in MailMate.
MailMate syncs with GMail gets throttled out when you do massive label changes. I just let it run and it catches up. But the latest emails make their way without issues even though they are throttled. Unused to apply a lot of labels to GMails and now I don’t. A very of them get labelled. The search capabilities are so great that o can pretty much nail down the right email.
For those that get labelled in GMall (Tagged in MailMate) they make their way to the the smart folders.
I also manually set rules in MailMate on incoming messages so they get multiple tags if some emails need them for one off situations. If an email needs to live with more labels I apply them at source (In GMail) automatically in settings. In this workflow I can use any email clients and the structure remains the same.
Yes, you’re totally right regarding Mailmate’s prowess and the workflow you’re suggesting is adequate. But for me it’s important to keep my worfklow for work mail after so many years and just in case I need to change platforms in the future (that’s a plus for other clients like Thunderbird or Postbox)
Just checked and yes, there is a gcal-data-provider update you can download from Github and also the “Quick Folder Move” plug-in has been updated. Thunderbird’s in the game again!
The only reason I found myself back on Apple Mail after using MailMate for awhile was that I had a couple of recurring situations where I needed to be able to cut and paste HTML into an email - and MailMate couldn’t do it.
But other than that, I really loved it. Lots of support for customization, rules, etc. - and I may wind up flipping back. I just had to have something that allowed the HTML paste, and didn’t really see the point of having multiple mail clients installed.
