I have written before about replacement options for tagging email and now find myself at a further crossroads with the imminent release of Sonoma and the withdrawal of mail plugins. I either have to use a new email client (like Postbox but cant sync between multiple Macs), switch to Gmail to use their labelling, or wait for Mailsuites new email client (suspect this will be feature limited).
I have many hundreds of tags as I give every project an individual numbered tag and this enables me to search accurately for all correspondence on this project.
Anyone care to share their thoughts if they find themselves in a similar boat?
I’m in the same boat and would welcome a solution. I’ve used MailSuite extensively for years, and feel that upgrading to Sonoma isn’t an easy decision because of losing that data. Apple announced years ago that Mail plugins would not be supported, and notified developers years ago that macOS 14 is when that will happen. I wrote SmallCubed a couple weeks ago to ask (again) when MailMaven would be released, and the answer was “we’re a small group and we have no idea when MailMaven would be released”.
I’ll take the Goliath path. I think my action will be to export all messages from currently active projects to DEVONthink, grouped by project, and then retag the messages there. I will just abandon the projects and tags I no longer use and go ahead and upgrade to Sonoma in a few weeks. For the future I’ll use smart groups in Sonoma Mail for new projects.
My thinking is pretty similar, revert back to a folder structure within Mail. Not yet sure how practical this will be but probably the best option for now…
I would recommend using Devonthink. Import your emails. It may retain the tags, but I’m not sure. You then have a full database app to search, tag, group and link to your emails. I have some 90K emails in a database and it works great.
Apple did not provide a more powerful replacement for mail plugins. Mail extensions use a very limited API and the tech has not been improved by Apple since they offered it. You can see how limited the technology is by the lack of implementation of mail extensions. Apple dropped the ball on both the deprecation of plugins and the lack of interest in making extensions a powerful option for third-party developers.
I agree. Have the same issue. I’ve now subscribed to Mailbutler. It has some good features but their tagging is so wonky to use it doesn’t help at all. It’s not at all possible to “group” messages by tag like you could with Mailtags in MailSuite. I think this is because it can’t really be integrated with Mail the way MailSuite was. It’s such a shame.
They’re full of S. It’s almost februari 2024 and not even one notification about MaiklMaven. A lot of people are anxiously waiting to replace the mailsuite plugins. Personally, I think bad for business SmallCubed to keep customers in the dark…
I’ve been waiting since 2022.
I extended my maintenance program with them as they requested.
Last September they sent out an email stating that for those who’ve extended their maintenance program, they would have a beta program ready for testing in November and that was the last that I heard from them… until they replied to the email that I sent them today (as to why I should renew my maintenance program):
Thanks for sharing that. I was a loyal MailSuite user. That email pretty much sealed the coffin for me returning to them. 3 people developing a mail app doesn’t sound promising either in delivering a rock solid product or updating the app as will inevitably be required.
I’m using Mimestream right now and it’s serviceable but I miss the days of Apple Mail and MailSuite plugins.
Good to know there’s a beta. Thank you @velocitymj. If you use the beta, please post your thoughts on quality and issues, if you have time.
There’s been three or fewer developers all along for MailSuite, and lots of fine software depends on that or fewer developers, so the number onboard does not faze me.
While Mailmate or Mimestream seem to be a one-man shop, writing a full email client is not an easy task, specially when you come from a background of writing Mail.app extensions so Mail.app was doing the heavy lifting. Albeit ancient, Mail protocols are manageable in their RFC form, but their implementations across mail providers are ever so slightly different as to make it a true programming hell.
Also note that Mimestream creator was part of the Mail.app team and he had the advantage of only working with Gmail API, and Mimestream was on beta for a year or so.
I understand the customer frustration, but Apple really could have done better.
On their support page they have this misleading statement about renewing your maintenance plan and the price that you’re paying for you pay for that, will carry over into the maintenance plan for Mail Maven… It doesn’t say anything about a subscription :
