Ask HN: Best email client for a Mac?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18057643

by mjfern • 8 years ago

42 70 8 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

dsr_• 8 years ago

mutt in your terminal of choice, to a local Maildir structure synced from your IMAP server, plus your search utility of choice.

_verandaguy• 8 years ago

Not sure why this is being downvoted. It works for a lot of people I know, is modular, stable, open-source and works across the Unixen.

The obvious tradeoff the relative lack of polish and overhead during initial setup, but if you're willing to put up with that it's a fine choice.

bojanvidanovic• 8 years ago

I also use Mutt.

noahdesu• 8 years ago

are you using mutt's built-in imap functionality, or something like offlineimap?

wanderfowl2• 8 years ago

Mutt is great if you're not often dealing with images or rich text, and if you love keyboard-based workflows. I was a mutt guy for a while. But I've found apps like MailMate or even GMail's web client to be keyboardy enough, without some of the compromises and pain points (e.g. fighting OfflineIMAP)

jason_slack• 8 years ago

I have wanted to switch to mutt a few times but it feels complicated to setup and adapt to my workflow. Plus I want to POP down most mailboxes but not all of them.

Doches• 8 years ago

I'm partial to Airmail (http://airmailapp.com/), which I use for a mix of Gmail and self-hosted (IMAP) addresses. Works great, lightning-fast to use, and with a very Mac-native feel.

overcast5• 8 years ago

Does that store mail on their servers at all? It's becoming increasingly confusing as to which of these new mail clients require a 3rd party server for them to do their "magic" on.

drc37• 8 years ago

I don't believe Airmail requires any 3rd party server. I have been using Airmail for a few years now and really like it.

jamesgeck0• 8 years ago

No. It does OAuth with GMail, but it's a local client.

wanderfowl2• 8 years ago

I've liked Airmail, but it has a tendency towards weird bugs (e.g. adding gibberish attachments to email chains in large numbers). Email tools, imho, need to be 'boring', stable, and predictable, and Airmail never has been, any of the times I've tried to use it.

bvm• 8 years ago

I have to dissent unfortunately, I find it slow, buggy, unwieldy, and it will frequently do crazy things to HTML formatted emails.

Yoric• 8 years ago

As I'm frequently switching across platforms, I still haven't found anything better than Thunderbird for my use cases.

lewi• 8 years ago

Spark does pretty well for me. Nice inbox features and search functions.

docdeek• 8 years ago

+1 for Spark. I know there are other clients that have snooze and ‘send later’ functions, but I’ve been using Spark for a couple of years and haven’t really had any complaints.

eknkc• 8 years ago

Another Spark user here. Works great. I'm also using the iOS version.

alienreborn• 8 years ago

FYI: Spark stores your credentials in their cloud unlike your typical email client which stores them locally.

https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/5grsan/do_not_use_...

nodesocket2• 8 years ago

I use spark and mostly happy, but the fact that I cannot setup inbox rules (if subject equals then trash) is a bit frustrating.

yborg• 8 years ago

This is the main thing that keeps me on Apple Mail. In any kind of work context it's absolutely required for me, and the other alternative mail clients mostly concentrate on being pretty, unfortunately.

y_molodtsov• 8 years ago

You can set up those in Gmail directly.

hhimanshu• 8 years ago

Spark works great for me too!

hagbart_celine• 8 years ago

Thunderbird

vityaz_• 8 years ago

Postbox is pretty swell.

krono• 8 years ago

I used to love Postbox until the latest 6th version.

Sure, they've - allegedly - made it run faster but they've also removed extension support, blocked any ways to hack in a calendar (which could previously be done by adding a permanent browser tab pointing to Google Calendar) and seriously hurt legibility with its new design by removing dividing lines, decreasing contrast across the board and giving all the icons a bright random colour.

A real shame as there are no real alternatives.

tpetry• 8 years ago

Searching in postbox is absolutely horrible. It will regularly not find the emails i am searching for and i have to go through all emails one-by-one.

Last example of today: Filtering emails whether they have an attachment. A mail with attachments i was searching for was not included in the selection.

seishan• 8 years ago

I've had a good experience with Mailspring. It has a clean user interface and sets of key bindings that are similar to email clients like Mail.app, Gmail, and Inbox.

wilbertliu• 8 years ago

What’s wrong with the built-in Mail app btw? I use it in daily basis and it’s pretty good to get its job done.

kalleboo• 8 years ago

I might be a "Gmail is weird" issue but I've always had trouble going through my inbox and deleting a lot of email one by one. They disappear, then they come back and then disappear again. Hitting undo after deleting something by mistake is also a recipe for disaster for email that kind of disappears but still shows up in search.

It can also be pretty laggy (e.g. selecting multiple messages), but this has gotten a lot better in High Sierra.

I still use it though since I have yet to find an alternative that I prefer (I've only tried a few though)

aequitas• 8 years ago

Not something that is wrong per se, but I moved away from the Mail.app because I switched to Inbox a few years ago because of it's productivity features. The way Inbox handled 'snoozing' mails (mails returing from snooze would appear at the top of the inbox) is not supported by Mail.app (or any other standard mail app for that matter, even Gmail at the time). So I switched to Inbox web app on the desktop as well.

I believe there are some plugins that support similar features, but I have not yet found a Mail.app snoozing that is portable as well (eg: Android/webapp support).

duckworth• 8 years ago

If you are using Gmail/G-Suite I would check out either https://mailplaneapp.com/ or https://www.kiwiforgmail.com/. Both are decent native Mac app wrappers for the Gmail/G-Suite web client.

scrumper2• 8 years ago

It gets quite slow with large mailboxes.

mcv2• 8 years ago

I've got pretty large mailboxes and have never had any problems. I used to be incredibly picky about mailreaders, but I've never had any complaints about Mail.app.

ahamino• 8 years ago

mail works fine for me with a large inbox (GMAIL).

kgwxd• 8 years ago

I hate that every email client also contains a poorly implemented database. Why is that part not standard and completely separate from the send/receive protocols and UI?

unrealhoang• 8 years ago

And it’s freaking fast. After trying out other mail clients, Mail app is the fastest in term of new mail sync speed.

cmurf• 8 years ago

Last time I used it with Gmail accounts, it doesn't show phishing warnings like Gmail proper does. For friends and family, I really want them to get flagged of anything suspicious - or even ideally an option to just not deliver anything suspicious.

aosaigh• 8 years ago

I just tried switching to it, but one instant problem is that you can't tie signatures to aliases, you can only tie them to accounts. So for example, I have a number of different email aliases that I switch between, but while Mail _does_ choose the correct alias depending on who the incoming email has been addressed to, you can't attach a signature to that alias - you have to manually choose the signature every time

k12tech• 8 years ago

Mailmate- good search, updates, responsive dev... keyboard centric

overcast5• 8 years ago

I love https://www.uniboxapp.com/, mainly for the way it treats mail as a continuing conversation like iMessage. It hasn't been updated in a while, but works well. I can't go back to the dreaded thread layout of most mail clients at this point.

tmikaeld• 8 years ago

I wanted to use this, but i couldn't get any answer from the developers if the App stores my e-mail credentials on their cloudservice. There was a review on app store where the user had their account overtaken in connection with installing the app.

overcast5• 8 years ago

Been using it for a couple years. Not aware of any cloud based account, there isn't a single mention of that anywhere. It's just a standalone mail client. I could be wrong though!

pixelrevision• 8 years ago

I started using spark since google announced discontinuing inbox. Works really well between iOS and macOS.

xwvvvvwx• 8 years ago

mailplane. I just want inbox but I don't want to waste a pinned tab on it.

hs86• 8 years ago

If you are looking for an email powerhouse that requires some time to set it up in order to use its full potential, then I recommend to take a look at MailMate: https://freron.com/

eatbitseveryday• 8 years ago

Does any integrate with Microsoft Exchange and their encryption of emails? It has made my use of Thunderbird less and less an option because of this.

sirn2• 8 years ago

If you're looking for a more traditional email client, I'd recommend MailMate[1]. It's a no-fuss email client designed for power user (GPG support, Markdown support, advanced filtering, text-only mode, etc.) I've been using it for half a year with Fastmail (personal) and Gmail (work) and pretty happy with it.

The author also maintains a blog[2] where he post quirks about several IMAP implementations. For example, Yahoo IMAP[3] or Gmail labels[4]. The app itself also handled all these edge cases very well.

[1] https://freron.com

[2] https://blog.freron.com

[3] https://blog.freron.com/2017/slow-descent-into-madness-yahoo...

[4] https://blog.freron.com/2013/mavericks-gmail-apple-mail-and-...

n10002• 8 years ago

I was very close to jumping ship with Mailmate 2 or 3 times. But the only reason that kept me from doing so is that it does not offer an option for local backups.

sirn2• 8 years ago

Not sure what you meant by local backups, but all messages retrieved by MailMate are stored in a plain directory as RFC 822-based EML file in ~/Library/Application Support/MailMate/Messages (which is relocatable from within the app). It also downloads all emails by default (but not the attachment).

overcast5• 8 years ago

$50!?

h0h0h0• 8 years ago

yes. It's your email. If you're in the market for improving how you interface with one of your number one communication mechanisms, you'll probably look at investing a tiny amount of money into it.

kps2• 8 years ago

You can pry Eudora from my cold dead hands…

geoah• 8 years ago

How does it feel holding on to a relic? :D

In a more serious note, are you actually using eudora? If so I'd love to hear if there is a still-maintained version as well as the reasons sticking to it.

kps2• 8 years ago

I still use it for ‘real’ (own domain) email, while using a popular web service for web logins and other junk attractants. I have an OS X 10.6 machine to run it along with some other things that I don't want to ‘upgrade’ (e.g. non-subscription Adobe CS). The main missing feature is UTF-8, but as an English speaker it hasn't been a problem in practice.

Eudora was recently donated to the Computer History Museum¹, so there's some faint hope of a revival, although it would more likely be the inferior Windows version.

¹ http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/the-eudora-email-client...

tannedNerd• 8 years ago

I've been really enjoying Canary. Good cross platform support for iOS and Mac and its a one time purchase instead of monthly. Add in the security features, snoozing, and smart notifications and its almost at inbox levels.

chillaxtian• 8 years ago

Mail.app

I use it with my personal email (hosted at Hover), and my work email, hosted on some IMAP server.

Works like a charm.

kposehn• 8 years ago

I’ve been using Boxy (https://boxyapp.co) for inbox for a long time and now they’re on to making Boxy Suite (https://www.boxysuite.com/) which should cover Gmail and Calendar once Inbox is deprecated.

Overall quite happy with them.

ljoshua2• 8 years ago

I've really been enjoying Astro recently (https://www.astro.ai/). I was a big Newton/Cloudmagic fan before they shut down in the last month, but nearly everything I liked from Newton is also present in Astro. Unified inbox, snooze/send later, excellent keyboard support, etc.

Also has the best "less important emails" inbox implementation that I've used so far. The whole gimmick of an AI bot I could chat with is just that, a gimmick, but bot the desktop and mobile apps are solid.

Wishlist items remaining: Newton had you have a Newton account that would automatically set up all your accounts when you installed it on a new device, but Astro doesn't do that. Also, I'd love it to automatically pick the right account to send from once I type in the recipient's address, based on past correspondence, like Newton did. But neither of these are even small issues.

xemoka• 8 years ago

Funny/sad considering that Astro was _just_ picked up by slack... with a shutdown of October 10th! That's a short sunset period... harsh.

ljoshua2• 8 years ago

BAGH!!! I just got the announcement email as well. Lame.

d3sandoval• 8 years ago

I loved Astro. Came to this thread after hearing the announcement :(

massung• 8 years ago

Just noting that if you're like me and use multiple gmail accounts for personal, work, etc., then I suggest Wavebox.

drivingmenuts• 8 years ago

Postbox works for me at home, Gmail at work (because corporate policy)

mikeloden• 8 years ago

try https://www.thunderbird.net/

declanqian• 8 years ago

Try https://notmuchmail.org/ with emacs

Ask HN: Best email client for a Mac?

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