Gang,
We are going back to look at email (it’s been years). My workflows have changed. Stephen has never shared his and so many email apps have shut down. Share your thoughts, challenges, and workflows for email here. We’ll include a few in the show.
After having been ‘reluctantly encouraged’ to use native GMail via Chrome by my employer’s all-in approach to G-Suite, I have become a convert to it … especially the keyboard shortcuts; ability to run it ‘as an app’ in MacOS with some simple Alfred Hotkey launchers; and the speed / flexibility of the tagging system and filters.
Clearly there are some reservations around data mining on personal Gmail accounts but - from a usability perspective - its pretty decent.
The IOS apps are tip-toeing their way to being useful but still need to play better in the, now table-stakes, world of multi-tasking and iPadOS trackpad and keyboard behaviour. Hopefully these will land soon.
For Gmail/GSuite on the Mac I generally prefer using either MailPlane or Kiwi. I can recommend both apps. For non-Gmail Mac email I’m resorting to doing mail in-browser but I’ve been long eyeing MailMate as a one-stop email shop.
On iOS I use either the Gmail app or the Yahoo Mail app, which is surprisingly good. (I’ve paid yearly for the ad-free, increased storage Yahoo Mail Plus for perhaps two decades.)
When people have asked me how best to consolidate mail so that it’s easy, safe and secure, I generally recommend Gmail (or paying $72/yr for ad-free, info-scaping-free GSuite) or Outlook Mail (AKA Live Mail, nee Hotmail), which is a solid performer and whose iOS app is excellent if you pay for any 365 subscription. If you want out of Big Corporate email the next-best option is probably Fastmail, and if you prioritize secure non-5-Eyes mail handling flip a coin or two between ProtonMail, Tutanota, Mailbox.org, and Posteo.de.
I usually save all my emails and archive two years’ at a time in individual mbox files.
Although I use Gmail (among other mail) I still hate tags, and prefer to rely on folders/boxes and search.
I’m using Apple Mail with Gmail accounts on iOS and Mac. It’s good enough for the throughout of emails I receive. It’s not great, but I’ve kind of given up on having an enjoyable email experience.
I use two different email applications: Airmail and Spark. I waffled back and forth between them for a while, then finally decided to go with both: one for work, and one for everything else.
I had several criteria for choosing an app:
I needed these apps so I could do two things: (1) Consolidate as much as possible, to minimize the number of places I need to check email. (2) Separate work and personal accounts so that I’m not tempted to go down the work rabbit-hole when I shouldn’t (academics are notoriously bad about taking time off).
So I use Airmail for my three work accounts (one assigned to me, one for the department I’ve been chairing, and one for an office that I’ve overseen for the past year), which are all GSuite accounts.
Spark is for everything else: a personal GMail account (I got it long enough ago that I had to get an invite for it), a grandfathered Google Apps for Your Domain account (if I ever end up doing anything serious with it I might upgrade to GSuite), and an Exchange account from an organization I’m associated with.
I tried Apple Mail a few times, but I was never satisfied with how it worked with the GMail accounts.
That Airmail and Spark are both available on iOS as well as MacOS provides some consistency across platforms, which I appreciate.
I need to say upfront that I hate web applications and so my email use has always been in the context of a dedicated client.
On macOS, I use Apple Mail for my personal accounts and Postbox for my (personal) business accounts. I was a Thunderbird devotee for years for two reasons: the Nostalgy plugin for keyboard shortcuts, and Thunderbird’s search-and-filter approach, which I found to be incredibly useful for quickly locating a message by winnowing down results. Over time, though, I got bored with the look and feel of Thunderbird and I switched over to Postbox to retain much of the functionality but with an interface facelift. Postbox has a similar set of keyboards shortcuts as Nostalgy for filing messages, copying messages, and jumping to folders, so I’ve been happy with that. I don’t find the search in Postbox to be as good as Thunderbird’s, and I’m not a fan of Postbox’s “focus pane” for filtering messages, but I no longer need to archive as much mail as I once did and so the search capabilities are not as important to me.
When I was able to use macOS at my previous job, I also used MailMate. I loved how granular it was, and I especially enjoyed being able to set different icon badge behaviors; I set one badge for messages from VIPs, one for an emergency list I had to monitor, and a third for priority requests. That really helped my workflow by allowing me to continue to process my email in scheduled sessions but with the flexibility of being immediately responsive if a critical issue was raised in my area. If I didn’t see one of those three badges from MailMate, I would ignore my email until the scheduled time, but if I saw a badge, I immediately knew the source and whether I would need to interrupt my work and respond.
On iOS, I use Mail.app for my personal accounts and Outlook for my work account since we are a O365 shop. I do very little email on my phone—mostly just reading and the occasional response—so I have never felt the need to find a better alternative.
Do you know that iCloud is not good as the only email? They are filtering emails and you don’t see them not even on junk spam or anything like that. It even happened to me with automators forum and chatted about this with Rosemary. I was trying to change my email to an iCloud one. I change this forum from @gmail to @iCloud. no issues, but on the automators forum I never received the email. If I tried another like @hotmail I get it with no issues. I did some research and it seems that in the past the Apple filtering is to strong and it can block you even some emails they think you should not receive it. I do not have rules or any third party application running that could block those emails.
Weird, would be great to know from all of you if you have problems with @iCloud. I want to get off the gmail wagon but with this, it got me thinking …
Work only allows Apple Mail on iOS. We have a few more options on macOS/Windows/Linux but the big three are Thunderbird (integrates via Lightning with our CalDAV calendar), Apple Mail (and Apple Calendar), and Outlook (no calendar integration though).
For personal email, I tend to stick with Apple Mail just because I can keep things simple. I use Fastmail so occasionally will switch to their iOS app or web client for Spam processing or basic work.
I also don’t like apps that store my email account credentials on their servers so most offering functionality beyond basic IMAP capabilities are non-starters for me.
I’ve written this elsewhere but I’m hoping to see solutions that don’t require MailTags as the developers always lag behind Mac updates and there’s still no iOS implementation available.
I’ve just used Apple Mail for about 15 years, all my time on a Mac. Before that I used Thunderbird.
I’ve got a Gmail, 6 POP, 2 IMAP, an iCloud and until recently an Exchange account. Mail handles them all just fine these days. I did have some problems with Gmail until I switched it off of POP. And there is some problems with rules, but not enough for me to look for something else. (I’ve got 19 rules). About 25,000 messages.
sharesheet, sharesheet, sharesheet, sharesheet & sharesheet…
I’m very happy to finally be very close to my dream email setup.
I use Airmail everywhere and I’m very, very happy with it. Despite their botched transition to subscription, the app has improved tremendously since they did, proving that subscriptions can bring durable revenue and help save the development of applications. Airmail has ironed out a lot of the issues I had with it and has been steadily developing new features. I love the feature parity between platforms (apart from rules, only available on Mac, but I’m filtering server-side anyway) and the fact that it pretty much does everything I would like: Send Later, customisable actions, Snooze, hugely customizables swipes on iOS…
I use the classical GTD model when dealing with email:
What I’m still missing is mainly Airmail features, but they are coming:
With that I think I will have my dream email setup.
I could add also that I’m devoting
Despite being in a rush to finish a big project at the moment, my inbox never had more than 10 messages and my OmniFocus email list more than 10 tasks, and it has steadily remained like this for weeks. It’s the best I ever got at email in my whole life!
I have lots of automations set up for Apple Mail that I cannot get any other email program to work with. My favorite is the excellent respondent auto-inserting script you posted a while back. I have this set up with a range of International greetings and this one automation saves me so much time. I work with many international students who have names that I’m not familiar with (and without automation I frequently misspell names which looks really bad). I use text replacement which means all my snippets work on Mail in iOS and MacOS.
I also have SaneBox and couldn’t live without the filtering, which puts all non-essential emails in a folder that I process once or twice a week. I find the Mail+Sanebox combination provides everything I need, and I actually enjoy using them. I’ve tried every other major client and none are as seamless and I find the interfaces get in the way of processing mail. It may be that I have got used to the keyboard shortcuts in Mail, any change feels like it slows my workflow significantly.
I know that similar features to the auto inserting of respondant (in the form of autocomplete) are available in Gmail, but I hate using a web app for accessing email as I frequently need to process my emails when traveling on long distance trains, when there is no cellular or Wifi connection.
I hate doing email on iOS in general, and only use Mail on iOS when I know I’m expecting an important message and I’m not at my Mac. I find processing email on iOS takes much longer as I don’t have the same level of automation tools available.
On the show, I’d like to hear your thoughts/insight into people who use multiple accounts for different tasks. E.g. a no-brainer would be work email is for work only. But to go one step further, I have an email address that I use only for genealogy research and correspondence.
To each his or her own, but: I have greatly increased my own productivity when I stopped treating my email accounts as separate. I have aliases corresponding to different hats, but everything gets in the same place and processed all together. Then tasks are addressed appropriately depending on whether they’re work or other stuff (using dedicated time blocks).
Pound for pound, Apple Mail still does it for me. The ability to compose on the Watch, easily Archive, the ubiquity of the similar UI makes it a go-to, still.
I have one non-obvious address I use purely to register software. I have one just to register my domains. One linked specifically to all donations and political contributions. (Every year or so I need to nuke that one and make another, as that one gets shared or sold, sometimes quickly). One dedicated to Amazon and my Washington Post subscription (though now I just log in through Amazon). I have two personal email accounts and two business emails. And I make free use of temporary email addresses for registering with some sites/fora that I don’t care much about.
to expand: I’m totally happy with my current email setup (stock mail app only)
The only feature that’s missing is the sharesheet. Put that in, and I’m done.
A few years ago I made the choice to use three different email apps for my three email accounts: Work. Personal. Newsletters/eCommerce.
This was not a technical decision at all. One of context and focus.
If I’m emailing my friends or family, I don’t want to be guilted by seeing unanswered work emails. When I’m working, I don’t want to see my personal emails. And I shouldn’t be checking my Newsletter account more than once a day. By having three different apps, I can have separate notification badge counts for work and personal, turn off work notifications on the weekend, and completely turn off all notifications for the Newsletter account.
This may seem overkill, but it allows me to stay focused on what I am focused on. Apps:
FWIW, I probably would use Spark as my main email client, but it does not yet support VIP-only notifications, like Airmail (and Apple’s Mail app) do, which is another game changer for me.