I uninstalled everything in the Suite except Mail Act-On. Seems to be running more smoothly now. My guess is that MailTags is the culprit of the performance issues.
To be fair with the developers, Apple hasn’t made it easy to develop and maintain OSX Mail plug-ins either.
The API for Mail is not officially supported, and subject to (unannounced) change.
Hence it is quite a achievement a company as SmallCubed/Indev to have offered these productivity products in these years.
I moved to MailMate as my mail client, but missing out on the Mail Act-On/MailTags plug-ins was actually my main doubt when moving over.
However the keyboard orientation and unsurpassed search of MailMate has won me over.
MailSuite was released last night. I am using it for Mail Act-on. It seems to be working so far.
Does anyone have a good use case for Mail Perspectives? It does not seem useful for my needs so far.
I’ve installed mail tags after uninstalling all and reinstalling just MAO. So far so good.
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i Installed all but MailTags this afternoon and no problems so far.
This is unfortunate, but I agree that without Mail Tags then MAO works ok. Too bad it’s really Mail Tags that I need.
Spam Sieve seems not to want to play with Mail Tags – keeps deactivating itself since installing the SmallCubed suite.
Mail rules also went haywire - applying tagging rules to inbound messages that do not meet the rule’s conditions.
And then the slowdown – the whole machine eventually drags to a halt when Mail Tags is active.
Reading through this thread, it just reminded me of what a shame it is that we all need to have a list of plug-ins to get Apple Mail to work the way we want it. I’ve been trying alternative email clients for years and they are never as stable as Apple Mail but I still don’t understand why Apple doesn’t try to put some of these power features right in the app.
I’m frustrated with mail clients as of late.
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FWIW, I’ve found MailHub does everything that I used to use Mail Act-On for, with a few bonus features for those who, like me, file their email.
Better price too, so I’m switching rather than upgrading MAO.
Hmm…I don’t use MailActOn’s rules - sounds like MailHub can do everything I need, too. Does anyone know of a detailed feature by feature comparison?
I had that feeling as well.
When you look at it, email is like a syncing problem. Lots of little text documents with binary attachments are sent over the internet to another server. Sometimes they are filed in folders, other times it is labeled. Ultimately, we -the users- are presented with a view of this information. I think this is where a lot of this falls down, because it’s not always consistent.
When you work with something enough, you start to come up with ways that may make it better. In this case, Mail.app is the bare minimum for what a mail app is supposed to do. They have to make it work. What this company is doing is the equivalent of adding after market parts to a car. They are adding extra value and that value takes resources.
Anyway, I think we feel the same way about this and hopefully things will get better.
SmallCubed just officially released the Suite out of beta. Anyone using it?
Yes. I was hesitant, but I went ahead and reinstalled the non-beta release. Current release says 1.0.5(b188).
It is successful and stable with macOS 10.14.3. I’ve had none of the prior issues: excessive CPU, excessive fan using, Mail hanging, Mail crashing. It is good to have MailTags and MailActOn back. (I don’t use the other features.)
Tx. Just saved me $60 
I realise this is a year down the road – but tried today to give MAO another whirl. I too disabled it, after getting tired of the fans spinning up in the beginning stages.
Went through the rigmarole, and now – at the point of “managing the plu-gin” inside Mail.app, I am told by the latter that the MAO mailbundle/plug-in has been disabled on account of it being incompatible with Mail 13.4…
Anyone running macOS 10.15.6 (Catalina) with a similar issue? Just want to confirm if this is a known issue, or only this side…
FWIW - I’m on Catalina but I’m not experiencing problems with MAO.
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I built an Alfred workflow a year or so ago that does 90% of what I use MAO for, and haven’t missed MAO.
Could you go into a little detail on that?
Sure - it’s a workflow with a hotkey set to the same key as I used to use to open MOA, & it calls a list filter set up as shown:
This leads to a series of conditionals – the first two just connect to key combos, and the third is this AppleScript
while the fourth connects up to a list filter with a (manually created and edited) list of commonly used folders and then to an AppleScript to file the selected messages in the chosen folder.
I wasn’t using MAO to its potential, and this covers my needs. It adds a few keystrokes to trigger the choices in the list filters but that was just a matter of retraining muscle memory.
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Bumping this up, as I’ve not been able to use my 2018 version of Mail Act-On since upgrading to an M1 MacBook Pro and macOS Monterey. Literally all I used it for was filing email messages (hotkey “m” in Apple Mail, then a couple of letters of the folder name before hitting return - incredibly quick), and I’ve been going a bit nuts that I can’t do that any more. However, the $30/yr subscription or $80 one-off price for an upgrade is steep for just that feature, in addition to the usual subscription fatigue.
@ktweb mentioned MailHub, but that seems to have fallen by the wayside. MsgFiler seems to still be going strong - I saw @Steinmanal’s comments from September 2018:
Here are few things I don’t like about MsgFiler:
- can’t use a simply shortcut like “v” - must use a modifier key - “option - v”
- the popover window to move a message will not appear in fullscreen mode
- the design is dated
It is functional, but I much prefer MAO.
Are any regular users of MsgFiler able to update us on whether some of these issues have been addressed?
I have a license for Keyboard Maestro (and even bought David’s Field Guide) but haven’t got round to playing with it yet, so setting it up purely for this purpose would be a bit of an overkill, especially if it doesn’t offer the ‘type a few characters to filter the folder’ feature.
Or indeed, are there any other alternatives people have found?
Thanks!
Similar to @dfay’s approach, I use an Alfred Workflow for the sole purpose of moving messages to a given folder.
The Alfred Workflow approach can be tied to a hotkey (that’s ⌃+M for me) and will generate a list of folders for the message’s account that can be filtered within the Alfred window.
As a side benefit, since it uses Alfred’s knowledge graph, it will gradually rise most frequent folders to the top of the list.
Should you want to give it a spin, I released this workflow on GitHub.
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