So, as near as I can tell in a cursory view, I would harbor a guess based on where I want to go that
Mailmate is a power user’s dream behind a straight-up vanilla UI
Postbox is Mailmate with a fancier UI and the ability to work beyond just plain text
Thunderbird is a watered down Postbox with some additional UI bling and widgety-type plug-ins
Again, while I currently like Spark on iOS where I just want to display emails that I should read, I need a different approach on macOS where I want to do the administrative work on the emails.
Thoughts on my quick-and-dirty Mailmate to Postbox comparison? I can’t help but to think that I’m missing something that suggests Postbox is as good as Mailmate in features AND has the ability to do more than just plain text AND has a fancier UI. Also, as to Thunderbird, I really don’t want an email app that promotes integration with chat and calendars. Just email thank you. I have other apps to do those other things. Yes, it is free but, sometimes you don’t get what you don’t pay for.
In the meantime, I am leaning toward Mailmate or Postbox and will download both to test soon.
I used Postbox only shortly, so I may not have all the information, but Smart Folders in MailMate are way more powerful. The amount of conditions you can define is insane You can also define rules to trigger certain actions when a message is added to the folder.
It looks very promising. I found too many “beta” issues to use it beyond my trial, but I will definitively monitor it. No image blocking, basic composer, no proper support for work with attachments, trouble using HTML signatures etc.
The idea that I should have to add plug-ins to administer email robustly or the idea that I should want email to plug in things other than the functions required to administer email robustly … these are the two issues. Granted, they are widgets only when they do not contribute to the core features that I need. Otherwise, they are simply missing features to the core application that you subsequently have to get through plug-ins.
If you’re speaking philosophically, maybe. But as far as I’m aware, there’s zero actual relationship between Mailmate and Thunderbird. And there are lots of features in Mailmate that Postbox doesn’t have. For example, as far as I’m aware, Postbox doesn’t support Markdown.
I would say instead that Postbox is a juiced-up Thunderbird, as it’s (at least originally) quite literally built on the Thunderbird code base.
I’m a fan of SpamSieve’s developer, and I am glad people love his product (I use his shoebox app EagleFiler) but my mail all comes through services like Gmail which already do a fantastic job of sifting out spam into spam folders so I never saw the need for SpamSieve. Indeed, one of my biggest annoyances with Apple Mail is that I repeatedly need to train it to accept mail it thinks is Junk… and it never seems to learn from its training.
Server side spam filtering is great, when you want it. However, I prefer to be able to do it myself, and have (attempted) to turn it off on of my accounts. I also run Little Snitch so that I can determine what each individual email is allowed to access. It’s slightly time consuming to setup, but once it is setup, it works really well. At least for me.
This isn’t a great solution, but I have Bear running anyway, so I will often copy HTML, switch to Bear, paste it (which converts it to Markdown), and then copy the Markdown out of Bear.
There are at least two Popclip extensions that can convert basic HTML; I use one by Terpstra called WebMD (WebMarkdown): “Clicking it will convert the selected headlines, text and links (including image links) to Markdown in your clipboard.”
You can also define rules to trigger certain actions when a message is added to the folder.
- Amen to that! They can kick rocks all day!