Like the cat in Heinlein’s Door Into Summer, I get this periodic itch to find the world’s best email client. I am starting to get the itch again now. In the past I have used Postbox, Apple Mail, Mailmate, Outlook, Thunderbird, and I am currently using EM Client. (I also think that I had short stints with Airmail and Spark mail but I can’t remember them :). Eudora was really good but I left that back when the year started with 19.
Each of them has had things that I like – but what happens is that over time, the little things that I “don’t like” start gnawing at me until I find myself using my spare time doing google searches for reviews of mail clients.
I don’t mind going back to something I have used in the past if that’s the right thing to do. But I am not sure that I could, right now, choose what that would be. So I am crowd-sourcing
I’m still using Postbox (on Ventura) and don’t see myself switching to another email client unless the OS forces me to do so when I get a new computer some time in the future. I tried EM Client when it was announced that Postbox would no longer be developed, but I prefer the clean interface of Postbox.
I’ve been very happy with MailMaven for the last few months. I generally don’t like email and used Apple Mail as a way of getting in and out quickly (I find Apple Mail quite flat and ugly, so didn’t want to spend long in there!) however MailMaven is so customisable with how you can assign a wide variety of tags to organise, I"m saving a lot MORE time with it now. I quite like the process of managing email again, which i didn’t think I’d ever say.
On FastMail as well - works fine with it as you’d expect.
+1 for Mailmaven. As a previous smallcubed customer I’m grandfathered in at $40 otherwise it’s $75.
As stated, good app with a ton of features. It was only released in Oct last year so still feels kinda beta software, there are glitches. Having said that the updates come thick and fast and it improves with every release. There have been 16 releases to date. Also integrates with Things and Omnifocus.
I tried switching to Mail recently (from Superhuman) but it only lasted a couple of days as processing email took so much longer. I tried setting up a Streamdeck with all the mail functions but still found processing email took much longer. I occasionally use AI for responses (especially yes/no emails), and this was also terrible in comparison - it took ages to get a response from Apple Intelligence and the quality was really poor quality compared to Superhuman.
So, I’m back with Superhuman and will be continuing to pay €10 a month to give me some time back each day.
I’m currently using Outlook, I know it might be polarizing choice in the Apple community
My main struggle with Apple Mail, is readability. I find Apple Mail’s interface very minimalistic, nice and clean, but the font rendering is a challenge for me. To read without eye strain, I have to bump up the font size when i write mail. The issue is that if I set it to something comfortable (like 12pt or larger), it actually changes the outgoing font size for the recipient, making my emails look massive on their end.
Outlook seems to handle this much better. The default scaling is easy on the eyes out of the box, and I don’t have to fight the settings just to read a long thread.
I’d love to use Apple Mail for that native feel, but until I can find a way to increase the display/UI font size without affecting the sent mail, Outlook remains my daily driver.
Are any of you dealing with similar scaling issues? Have you found a clever workaround for Apple Mail?
P.S. I’m not that old, I’m just 43 years young and 9 months!
I tried using Apple Mail, but I quickly gave up - mostly because of interface issues and it’s (un)readability. So it’s not only you:)
In my case, I use two Gmail accounts (personal and workspace) anyway, so the web client (in the form of a Chrome web app pinned to the dock) is the most convenient for me.
Same mail client I’ve been using since 1996, mutt. Mutt + offlineimap works really well with Fastmail, but I did use the Fastmail app on my iPad where mutt is not an option.
Ditto. MailMate is fantastic, especially the efficient and unobtrusive “conversation” view. That, combined with customizable single-key navigation/action along with top speed and search make it great.
If I had to go elsewhere, I’d either go with MailMaven or just use basic Apple Mail. (If I used gmail, I’d be tempted by Mimestream, but I don’t—work is Exchange and home is iCloud).
I did like Mailmate. Maybe going back there is the right thing to do. Is it still being maintained? My recollection is that it was one guy in Scandinavia…
Yes, MailMate is still being maintained. I believe it is still a single developer (who as I recall is also a doctor?). I’ve been using the test release since October. Since then, I believe the developer has been doing more deep under-the-hood work resulting in no public releases for a while. But the test version is excellent and very stable. Get the 6290 release:
I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Mailmate. Always had issues deleting MS Office email.
When I went back to it recently I found it was now a $40 a year subscription. I prefer the feature set of Mailmaven for that price. If the $40 sub a year for Mailmate speeds up development then that would probably be worth it. I do miss writing my emails in markdown though!
