You can almost get some variant of the first example going. Fastmail can run regular expressions on filter conditions, for instance.
What won’t work is anything that happens after a message has been received. Neither “message is more than one week old” nor “If I move a message to this folder” can be achieved via filters, because filters only act on incoming messages.
I suspect that this is a limitation of serverside rules.
Other clients also offer post-incoming filtering. Postbox has a great filters system. But I have heard that Mailmate’s the one to beat.
Right. And oddly enough, that’s true with MailMate as well (unless you run things manually) - but if you use a smart mailbox “received” technically happens when the message arrives in that mailbox. And since smart mailboxes can have conditions like “more than a day old”, the messages “arrive” automatically as soon as they meet the criteria.
One of my more minor gripes with Fastmail filters was that there’s no way to even manually run the filters after the fact. So if I realize I should have a filter to deal with a couple hundred messages, I can try setting up the filter and hoping I have it right for next time. Whereas with MailMate I can just test it immediately and identify any problems.
I have used Kiwi for Gmail in the past. It’s a Mac app. Pretty sure it’s Electron – at least, it doesn’t feel like a “Mac-assed app” to me.
But it’s a standalone app, it lets you use multiple accounts, Gmail keyboard shortcuts, snooze outgoing email, etc. etc. At least a few plugins work as well (including Boomerang, though I haven’t used it).
I preferred it over Gmail in the browser because I already often have 3-5 browsers open at any given time with multiple windows and many tabs in each window. No way do I want to have to dig through that to find my email all the time.
I ran into very little, if anything, that could be done with Gmail in a browser that couldn’t be done in Kiwi. I suppose it’s just a very good wrapper for a browser window, but it worked for me.
Great overview. I’ve used SaneBox for many years, and somewhat grudgingly. Aside from the very high cost, my main problem is the rigid filtering based on email address.
Unfortunately, the other solutions aren’t any better. Local filtering won’t cut it as I live on multiple devices, and maintaining a massive handmade filtering system is a PITA that I won’t return to. These options are cheaper financially, but either would annoy me on a daily basis or would suck up a lot of my time.
Yeah, there has to be some central filtering to make things dance properly on a multi-device setup. For me though, I can run that on a spare Mac Mini I have that acts as a server.
Regarding maintaining the separate filtering system, as long as MailMate doesn’t break somehow I’ve found there’s not a lot to actually maintain. No more, anyway, than constantly screwing around with dragging messages around in software like SaneBox.
And at Sanebox’s top tier, one could actually get a Mac in the cloud for the same monthly price that could run filtering software.
Either way, if it works for you, don’t change what ain’t broke.
I agree with everything that’s been said here, but the fact is that I can’t find a single service that can do ML-based filtering and categorization without being creepy.
So SaneBox plus simple filters based on keywords (preferably in the title) is the best I’ve found…
