For my work account (Exchange) I currently use Apple Mail on my iPhone, and Outlook for Mac. I have dabbled with all of the major clients, and like many, keep trying them again periodically as they are updated. There is a particular feature that I use which has prevented me from adopting some of the popular choices around here like Spark, and Airmail. That is the ability to mark a particular email in a conversation thread, rather than just the entire conversation either marked or not. So, if I have a thread that has 37 emails in it, I may decide that 2 of those are critical and should be flagged. I don’t want to just mark the whole darn thing because that’s not granular enough.
From what I can tell, I am a pretty odd duck for caring about this, because I never see it mentioned. Both Apple Mail and Outlook for Mac do this, but not too many other clients do. I think Mac Mail does, but that’s about it.
Are there other clients that do this that I am missing? Should I rather be persuaded that this is not an important feature and that I am “doing it wrong”?
I can’t help with other email clients, as I use Outlook on both iOS and macOS. But as a fellow Exchange user (for work), I also use this feature often. So, no judgement here
Thanks! On a side note, have you ever tried Mac Mail for your Exchange account? I keep reading from all Apple people that Mac Mail is superior, but I seem to have found Outlook for Mac to be more stable and reliable in interacting with our Exchange server.
My experience is that both have handled my Exchange mail just fine. The reason I use Outlook is that it seems more tightly integrated with Exchange when responding to calendar requests and the calendar module inside Outlook supports a lot more Exchange features than Apple Mail + Calendar. Also, we are heavy users of Microsoft Teams, so Outlook has nice integration of email and calendar with Teams, while Teams support seems non-existent in any other email clients that I have seen.
That’s good to know. I did a bunch of email archiving recently after Outlook had become a little slow (over 7 years of emails and a database file of around 6GB may do that). Things are much snappier now, and I was leaning toward trying Apple Mail just to keep things leaner and more “native.” It may just be all those years of muscle memory and trusting the Office app, but I can’t quite get myself to try Apple Mail for more than a day or two before I go back to Outlook (which is running great now that my Inbox is tamped down).
