Forgive me, but what follows is a bit of a James-Joyce-Stream-of-Consciousness post.
Like many of us, I spend a lot of time in e-mail. Unlike many of us, I really like email. I’ve tried experiments using tools like Yammer and Slack, but have always found that you still eventually end back up using e-mail. So what’s the point? E-mail is fast, convenient, easy, and exceedingly reliable (Outlook PST files to the contrary notwithstanding, and even those are mostly reliable).
With respect to e-mail clients, I have never adored one as much as Eudora, but I’ve been quite happy with Apple Mail. On desktop, it is all I use.
I, like @Helios, can’t abide web applications, so I’ve never found myself a fan of gmail or other web e-mail applications. I never interact with my gmail account on the web, unless I absolutely cannot avoid it.
My thoughts on clients follow, but I don’t believe that e-mail clients have much to do with what bothers people about e-mail. Its seems to me that the reason people get frustrated dealing with e-mail is less a function of the client they are using than it is their processes for managing email. Example, when I stopped treating my e-mail inbox as a to-do list and actually fully processed my e-mail (responding to the easy ones, filing the non-actionable ones, and adding the ones I needed to postpone for later into OmniFocus), e-mail became a non-problem for me.
Keyboard shortcuts, rules, and scripting make our time in e-mail more productive and efficient, and Apple Mail seems to handle those things mostly well. I find Apple Mail’s rules to be lacking and I’d like to see that tool improved–and taken out of the preferences pane where it seems like an afterthought. Here are some examples of where I have had trouble with rules. I have some rules that run multiple times on the same e-mail messages (I’ve disabled them). Some rules are only supposed to run on certain inboxes, but they run on all my inboxes no matter how they are configured. So, that should be fixed.
I do a lot of searching in my e-mail archives, and I’d like Apple mail to be better at that. It’s pretty good, but why can’t I search for a particular day (excluding particular days of the current month)? I would like search to be able to distinguish between emails that were sent “to” me, those that I was BCCd on, and those I was just copied on.
Where I see a client that is most in need of improvement, it’s Apple’s iOS Mail app. I access (or would access!) mail on iOS more than anywhere else, but there are annoying little problems that need to be improved. First, let me get this out of the way. Apple Mail on iOS has been very reliable for me (except during the iOS 13 beta period last summer, but I accepted that risk). I seldom have trouble sending, receiving, or filing emails. What I would like from iOS Mail is the ability to get my e-mail message OUT of e-mail. I can’t even move a message from one e-mail account to another on iOS the way I can on a desktop, and that comes in very handy. Also, on desktop, I use tools that archive my messages as PDFs in my file system. I would like to be able to do that or do other things to get a message out of my e-mail repository an into some other place. Printing to PDF is an acceptable workaround, but it’s not the most efficient solution to this problem.
The e-mail message attachment-size limit needs to be greatly increased. I send lots of attachments that (would) exceed the 10 or 20 MB limit.
Replying to an e-mail I’ve sent addresses the message back to me, instead of the other recipients. Sometimes I want to send a follow-up e-mail message to someone I’ve already emailed. So I reply from my sent message box. iOS Mail is not programmed to address the message to my original recipients, but instead addresses it back to me. Try this on Apple Mail on the desktop, it does it the right way.
I do not think Apple Mail on iOS gives you enough notice of emails that are stuck in our outbox or that failed to send. I haven’t been in the habit of checking an “outbox” in e-mail since I got away from dial-up Internet. But sometimes I only learn that an e-mail never was sent after I just happened to to a reset my iPhone and get a warning after the reset cycle or or the recipient calls me to let me know they never got a message I was sending them. This is a rare problem, no doubt, but it’s annoying when it occurs.
Search on iOS mail could be substantially improved along the same lines I mentioned for desktop. One particular improvement I would like is a better interface for the search bar. I often use at least three search facets when trying to narrow down a results-set, but the search bar is too short and there is often no way to get past the last facet to add additional ones. It’s not impossible but it’s not easy, either.
Lastly, I would welcome the ability to have rules in iOS, as well as Shortcuts support. Lots of Shortcuts scripting hooks would be great.
