SmallCubed Twitter has been dormant for 172 days. I wonder if they’ve even launched it in Xcode within the last 30 days. That’s being said Apple hasn’t exactly lit the world on fire with their mail client and extensibility.
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I’ve used the free version of ProtonMail; it works fine, but I found it to be restrictive because I normally use S/MIME for secure email rather than PGP (ProtonMail is a PGP implementation).
Airmail allows S/MIME configuration on Mac and iOS. Apple Mail does as well. When I tried Spark, it did not support S/MIME.
I am currently using Airmail. Time will tell if I stick with that or revert back to Apple Mail when my 6-month “loyalty” phase passes with Airmail.
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Anyone considering trying Airmail should be warned: it has (for me at least) one showstopper downside - as I found to my cost. It has no means of exporting the messages it holds, so once you’ve started using it you can never get rid of it unless you are happy to lose al the messages you received whilst using it And so far as I can tell, this is no mere oversight. It seems to go to great pains to hide the content of the message base, or the files holding it - I have seen quite a long time searching my file system for text from emails held by Airmail, with absolutely no success. There seems to be no automated way to extract your messages! This looks suspiciously like a deliberate attempt to tie users in. For that reason alone, and however great Airmail was (and, frankly, I wasn’t that impressed, even though it does have some nice features) I would never use Airmail again.
Surely if you’re using IMAP this is a non-issue?
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I second @rosemaryorchard - I use IMAP and have dived in and out of Airmail at complete will without any consequences whatsoever. I could get out tomorrow with all my messages intact and use any other app - I could even use any other app in parallel of it.
I have found the same. I use Airmail on iOS and Apple Mail on the Mac. All my accounts use IMAP. If I send a message on my iPhone it goes into the sent mail folder for that account. If I open Apple Mail on the Mac and go to the sent item folder the same message will be there.
Have you checked the folder mapping settings for your mail account within Airmail? Double check it is saving messages to the correct folder on the mail server.
Here is an example for a Google Apps account in Airmail
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The amount of mail I get very rapidly fills up my IMAP space, so I am obliged to transfer messages to local mailboxes. If it works for you, fine - but I wouldn’t knowingly do business with any company that attempts to lock its customers in - and so carefully hides their own data from them - the way Airmail does.
This is unwarranted criticism of the app – to say they “attempt to lock customers in” – when you can readily move messages, within the app, to the standard IMAP protocol from where you can do whatever you please with them. If your use case is not adapted to what Airmail provides, that’s totally cool, and I am the first to say that the devs have many faults to atone for, but locking customers in certainly isn’t one of them.
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Gave up on airmail a good while ago, currently using Mailmate on the macs and just plain old apple mail on iOS. I leave Mailmate open on my MacMini and have rules which process mail as it comes in so I really do not miss too many whizzy iOS features most of which I can do without anyway.
Oh just wanted to mention Mailmate is the only (I think) third party email that integrates with Spotlight , if set up in a certain way allowing HoudahSpot searches.
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Happy Days uninstalled Airmail on Mac, iPhone, and Ipad. The last straw was AirMail continuing to crash on the Mac.
Believe it or not, switched back to Outlook. One reason is that the one company that I work for only allows Outlook but I as I have stated in other posts, Microsoft has up their game in the apps department.
I am also using Unibox and love the UI and Sender grouping. It allows one to quickly go through a bunch of emails and it is available through the SetApp subscription.
I think the SetApp is the most valuable subscription service with more and more apps being curated under its service.
SetApp
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As has been said before, it’s a deeply personal choice. Outlook, for me, gets the same level of praise as Windows… “It’s not as bad as it used to be.”
You say Microsoft have “upped their game in the apps department” but I really wish they’d up their game in the execution department. Most of their software has great ideas and terrible execution. For instance, their apps are the only apps I have ever encountered on iOS/iPadOS that deliberately crash themselves. This week it steadfastly refused to sync with my Google calendar so I used the “Reset account” button, which informed me it would “restart” the app. Never seen it on any other products than MS.
So I said I would report back, huh?
Well, as much as I love the idea of Airmail, the same problems are there. The lack of polish on this app is infuriating and sometimes leads to serious issues: I had an important send later fail on me, just lost an important long draft as I was typing on my iPad (my iPad! Supposedly the most stable platform!) Send later for aliases never worked and fails silently and so on.
If only the Airmail devs would collectively spend more time in polish and attention to detail. I want to love the app. It just never lets me and ends up biting me in the end.
Come on, Newton mail, you’re my last hope now
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Well that was quick, Newton cannot sync Fastmail IMAP correctly!
So… among the apps and correctly integrate with OmniFocus, that just leaves me with drab, drab Apple Mail.
So sad.
Apparently drab “just works. “ 
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I am still a fan of Gmail’s web app and I have taken the time to program >600 rules to automatically route emails from certain sources to specific folders and newsletters forwarded to newsletter RSS reader and flagging important emails.
The rule setting appears to be limitless.
I have previously hit limits on Outlook but these may have been expanded by now but you still need Outlook to hosted somewhere and this is dictated by one of the companies that I work for.
The only thing to be aware of is that Goggle uses its own jargon. Labels = Tags and Filters=Rules.
The “detail” that pushed me away from Airmail was its inability to consistently show me the content of an email. Seems like a fairly important detail.
Whelp!! I’ll never get close to even 10% of that number, but it’s pretty hard to beat Gmail’s rules. My list of rules has grown and shrunk again over the years. Mostly the shrinkage is when I decide that rather than filing a specific type of email I’m better off just never receiving it.
But while I love the immediacy of the web interface (think about that for a moment!) and can’t stand* using Mail, I’ve become a convert to the new Mimestream which combines the best of both. There are many features it does not have yet, but at the rate they’re developing it, I expect Google will be taking features from Mimestream before long!
*The one feature that any mail client must have before I will consider using it is the ability to delete, archive, or close any email without opening another. Mail continues to fail on this basic task. It amazes me that any mail client should ship without this as an option. We’re not all GTD junkies.
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)I was one of the first Airmail adopters but the more familiar I got with the developers, the more shady and evasive they appeared to be… I did pay for the sub for 1 year because they promised things would be better. It never gets better. On the Mac I am using Spark because it sucks less than other email apps, on iOS I am using a combo of Dispatch/Spark. I need Spark for MSO365. I have given up hope that there will ever be an email app that wows me. The best developers just don’t make email apps.
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Seconded entirely. It baffles me that the whole of the tech sphere has literally been saying for years that the app is powerful but lacks polish. I would think the devs would get the hint. They don’t (and I’ve been on their beta Slack). Makes me wonder if some talent didn’t leave the company at some point, leaving it struggling to keep up. Because I cannot see how the Bloop of today could have developed such an initially robust code base.
Anyway, came back to Spark because it works entirely as advertised. I miss a great ability to turn emails into tasks, but that’s the only cross platform app where the feature set works entirely as advertised (barring Apple Mail of course).
What are your issues with Spark regarding Omnifocus? for me, Sparks lone redeeming feature is its omnifocus integration.
Edit: ah, I see your previous post now. Yeah, the straight to inbox makes for an extra step. But isn’t that what Apple Mail does? The only Service I see is Send to OF inbox.