I’m tired of using webmail platforms (iCloud and Fastmail). It’s been years. I needed to do it because my university email settings were… hm… complicated. So I abandoned Mail.app. However the situation has been solved for a couple years now and it’s time to regain more control over my mailboxes (which, seriously, were a mess until this week when I finally tackled them doing some severe cleaning and organization).
I’m currently considering either going back to the standard Mail.app or start using Mailmate.
I’ve seen several people in this forum praising Mailmate capabilities, so I was wondering if any of you would be up to tell, in a few lines, what you love so much about it (or not!).
Just to give you little update on myself: I use three main mail accounts (iCloud, Fastmail and the university that nowadays is connected to MS OneDrive) and several mail address alias.
I also tend to use DEVONthink quite a lot for storing and organising data and would be interested to know if anyone connects the two apps (mail/mailmate > DT) and how.
Finally, if someone knows about cool sites to find workflows/tips/usages for Mailmate I would also be grateful. I’ve been checking this YouTube set of videos and it is making me really consider buying Mailmate… Still — at 58 EUR I really need to know if it is worth it. Thus the call for feedback.
It’s my weekend and I have a lot of other things to do, so I’m not going to respond to all your questions. Bottom line: I love Mailmate. I find it both easy and powerful to use. It offers a number of connections with other apps: I mainly use the connections with OmniFocus and DevonThink. Easy keyboard shortcut to send something to OmniFocus (e.g.).
It’s a markdown centric app and that’s something I love about it also. If you hate markdown then that’s a negative.
Easy to tag, organze into sub-folders, etc. etc. I don’t think of it as expensive as it gives me exactly what I want, been using for 10+ years.
I"m always amazed when MacSparky moves on to yet another email client! In the end, I’d suggest getting something that works for you, learn how to use it well, and be happy. Or you can take the MacSparky route of always looking for mail nirvana–and that’s a sorry journey.
Some screenshots below showing how Mailmate allows you to activate “bundles” (i.e connections with other apps) and the shortcuts for getting stuff to those other apps.
I have learned that the macOS 14 will eliminate mail plug-ins/bundles. I’d wonder whether this affects Mailmate. Perhaps their bundles run independently.
If you are interested in exploring yet another email rabbit hole, consider a recent announcement for MailMaven.
@Mathew_T_Mitchell I specially appreciate you taking time to show some of the bundles available.
Right now think I might get the trial (the usual 30 days before buy) and then decide how well it will fit me. And, no, not in the mood to get into the route of mail nirvana by trying all apps available. But, then again, that experience is important for MacStarky and his current trade.
I love Mailmate too. I probably tried all the email clients under the sun and finally settled on Mailmate. I find that it’s search function is superb. There may be some learning curve and it may not have a pretty UI but it works. Also have a great community and mailing list to help each other out.
However, I must say that I do not use all the advanced features but they are there
Big advocate of Mailmate, used it now for many years, it’s rock solid, standards compliant, has a search, filter and rules which no other mail app can touch,
In addition to all the love here for MailMate (with which I’ve long agreed), I also wish to remind you of the, um, unusual way the native Mail app handles attachments. Heard no news about that from the latest WWDC and, given that it’s been this way for pretty much the OS X/macOS app’s entire existence, am assuming it won’t change while I’m young enough to compose coherent thoughts.
That said: if it doesn’t bother you, then go ahead and keep Mail in the consideration; but it might be a show-stopper for other folks.
I tried it a year or two ago and ran in to issues with it using my university email - whilst it was O365, I seem to recall I had to download and run a Beta because of some security settings that the university had implemented (I think it was 2FA related, but it’s been a while).
I also seem to recall it was double saving sent emails - the O365 server was auto saving the message, and Mailmate was also saving a copy. I didn’t spend much time trying to fix that however though and moved back to Postbox.
Easy to set up and handles all my accounts very well. More reliable than Apple Mail which sometimes loses access to my personal server accounts
Small footprint - sits quietly in the background and doesn’t consume huge resources
Tremendously functional - I don’t use a lot of the power, but I know that if I ned it, it’ll be there
Bundles (mentioned earlier), especially now that Apple Mail doesn’t support plugins
Spamsieve integration (especially now that Apple Mail doesn’t support plugins)
What I don’t like
No IOS client. I use Preside when I want more than Mail can give me - it has the ability to send messages to other apps that Mail has always lacked
Visually, not very attractive
It took me a while to get used to it, but overall, I’m happy with it. The main thing is that it gets the job done without fuss and keep out of the way otherwise
I love mailmate, but would not recommend it if you’re using O365. I also find the the export to Devonthink not nearly as easy as the email archive available through the mail.app.
Mailmate is hands down the best search and mail organising app on the planet.
Yes, I love Mailmate too, mostly for the concise search language (type ‘f steve’ to find messages from Steve)
Office 365 can barely be counted as a proper mail system now, as they keep dropping support for legacy protocols, but when I had to use it for a while, the developer was very good at providing access to betas which enabled me to stay connected.
Fortunately, I was able to stop using Exchange before I had to stop using Mailmate
This isn’t Mailmate’s fault but Microsoft. Microsoft is using a mail protocol that isn’t standard thus causing a ton of problems, even with its own mail clients. If you sent a mail, your Mailmate is saving it under “sent”. Microsoft decided to save it again. Resulting in saving every mail two times. In earlier days devs and users had a proper way to disable this feature in Outlook. But M$ decided to disable the switch. The same goes for folder naming where M$ uses strange folder names so that any other mail app will have problems. In earlier days it was possible to access the folder structure of M$ mail servers but they decided to disable it. Resulting in conflicts if you use any other language than English, even with their own mail apps.
Postbox was a good client but they are very silent since 2020. They haven’t updated Postbox for Apple silicon and questions about this this topic stay unanswered. I wouldn’t recommend to buy it anymore. Postbox uses a lot of battery and RAM. If you like the style I would use the new Thunderbird beta channel.
Yes the mailmate dev is working hard to keep up with M$ bs. They obviously want everyone to use their clients for data mining. M$ didn’t even made the iOS client themselves, a third party company was tasked with it. Resulting in renaming of folders, creating second folders to existing ones, security flaws…
I was never a fan of Outlook or the MS iOS client they acquired when they purchased Acompli. But most large organizations have given up with on-premises email and moved to either Microsoft or Google. They are not equipped to deal with attacks from nation states like Russia and Iran. Even the US Army started moving their email to Microsoft a couple of years ago.
I’m not sure how long third party clients will be able to keep up.
Especially when Google and Microsoft are making their email systems more proprietary as stated above by @johnkree. That’s why I shifted to Fastmail a few years ago.
Happy MailMate and Preside (on iOS) user, here (not that I have a heavy email use in my business, but both programs are so stable and work so well). I just wish iMessage/SMS was as flexible as MM and Preside. I need to use texting so much more than email, it’s frustrating. Many of my clients wouldn’t even dream of calling me or emailing me. Texting is top of mind for them.
I’ve never used Fastmail but it has a good reputation. I’m not aware of any major changes to Google mail in recent years. AFAIK they have always used their own secret sauce to connect to their apps. My guess is they do that to increase performance. Gmail stores everything in a single directory and IMAP performance suffers when connecting to large directories.
I would be happy if I could change my default message app. I’ve been places where cell service is terrible and data is available but there is almost zero bandwidth. In this situation iMessage will not switch to SMS regardless of its settings but android phones can usually send/receive messages.
I will look at Mail Mate, I have similar issues to you. I use DEVONthink 3 but the plugins will be gone soon I believe for security reasons. One can drag and drop and I will do that into the app if I have to.
Mostly everything for ten years is in Archive on Apple Mail. I still find most things, eventually!
I have to say that at the moment, after having some pretty dangerous emails from a friend who has been dead for months I am now more concerned about security than convinience on email and frankly on my browser too. I did have some malware the last CleanMyMac run I did, first time ever, it was putting up ad popups apparently.
It is frustrating but I am prioritizing security at present.
tried to email a Remarkable Tablet page to myself and then forward it to the Capacities app via a rule in Apple Mail but it didn’t work. It works fine with a rule in Mailmate. (You can’t directly email to Capicities from the Remarkable tablet because Capacities requires you to use the email that you signed up with).
Is anyone using Mailmate with Google (our institutional email service) who can comment on reliability, especially with regard to whether doing so may cause “ghost” email duplicates? For example, when I completely removed all SmallCube plug-ins just recently, my unread mail count was cut in half or more.
I am also using Spark on iOS / iPadOS, and any comments on cross-compatibility here would be appreciated as well.
