I used to use Apple Mail, and then with the release of (I believe) Catalina there were some nasty bugs where there was the potential for email loss during the IMAP sync process. So I switched to Outlook, because I have an Office365 subscription.
But Outlook is at least a little frustrating because it wants me to use its built-in calendar, its built-in contacts, etc. I’d like my email client to understand that this is a Mac, and that I already have a calendar / contacts system.
So….considering switching back to Apple Mail, but concerned about reliability. Anybody have any experience?
And alternatively of course, any other mail clients that have good system integration?
It’s anecdotal but I’ve never lost email due to Mail and I’ve synced from a few different services.
I maintain multiple clients (Gmail, Mail, Outlook, and Spark though not every account is in every client) because they’re best at different kinds of reads and replies, and suit different moods of mine. I’d certainly recommend Mail unless you work with a lot of Gmail/GSuite users who use long email chains; Mail isn’t as good at keeping those connected.
I’ve wanted to believe in Apple Mail and every other year or so they trot out new features of Mail at a WWDC Keynote and my hopes are renewed …until I try it.
Apple Mail feels like an app without a soul. Apple puts features into its lifeless body yet somehow they can never seem to care enough to revive its spirit. I’ve even tried turbo boosting it with Mail Suite 2019.
The killer feature of mail is to be able to search in Spotlight. It’s just not powerful enough to deal with the poor SPAM detection/filtering and other ho hum mundane features or lack thereof like decent integration with the outside world. Airmail for me …for now.
Apple Mail is the only Mac mail that hasn’t been unreliable for me
It has always worked well, at least with my accounts, I can’t say the same for other clients I’ve tried (Spark and Airmail in particular have both let me down in terms of stability).
I’ve not seen any issues since he first catalina beta (which did had some missing email issues)
Have 9 imap/icloud/gmail accounts in use, and apart from some Gmail hickups every now and then because Google thought up their own imap implementation, no issues.
I would really hope the Apple Mail problems are fixed, since I’m about to switch back to Apple Mail, since none of the apps I tried (Airmail, Spark, Outlook) fulfils my needs on the iPad.
Spark doesn’t support most keyboard short cuts on the share sheet, outlook doesn’t fully support drag and drop and Airmail I didn’t bother long enough to find out since the design was awful.
So I hope that Apple Mail will work!
Yes that’s it, Spark is great on Mac and it works great on iPad as long as you don’t use the share sheet extension, where it’s awful. Command-enter to send does not work, not even tab to go to the next text field works. That’s enough, since I’m working from home, where I am iPad only (my Mac is at work).
Yup, that’s what I remember hearing about. Some sort of IMAP sync issue in the early stages of Catalina, I seem to recall that it was after the betas though. Might be mis-remembering.
Thanks for the confirmation that I’m not losing my mind.
I’m stuck on High Sierra due to old hardware. Mac mail has been great until recently where it has started crashing regularly. Quite a few crashes after waking from sleep but not sure if the sleep was the cause or just the time elapsed.
I don’t use iMap my accounts are all POP mail but… I’ve never had a problem with Apple Mail other than extreme slowness once I got past 80K messages. Moving them into a separate DEVONThink Database has solved that. I’ve never lost an email with POP and I’ve never had to worry about how much storage my email takes on some server.
Just got my iMac up to Catalina. The only real mail problem was in the 30 hours that I was offline I had over 600 messages come in and both SpamSieve and my mail rules were initially disabled. Mail downloaded all of them into my inbox before I could get the rules etc. working again making for a very long inbox clean out. The other issue was that for some reason the apply mail rules to messages function in Catalina does seem to be broken but once I got them working it’s all ok now.
Data could be (at least partially) reconstructed from server backups. And with any mail client it’s easy enough to set up archive folders to be local, thus removing the mails from the servers. For a security standpoint, IMAPS is state-of-the art and secure POP3 is a mess.
As for the argument “servers I do not control”: that`s why my mail, being very critical, runs on my own server.
I’d certainly recommend Mail unless you work with a lot of Gmail/GSuite users who use long email chains; Mail isn’t as good at keeping those connected.