13 ms·

Email Apps Suck

52 points by schneidmaster 10y ago

captainmuon 10y ago
No mention of Postbox (https://www.postbox-inc.com https://www.postbox-inc.com)? It's based on Thunderbird, but has very good support for conversations and archiving (Gmail-like workflow) even for non-Gmail providers. It also has nice native looking styles for macOS and Windows. For me, it is one of the best clients... although I use primarily windows and sometimes Linux (where it works fine with wine), so I can't try the macOS-only ones.
- robgering 10y ago
  Have to recommend Postbox as well. It is the only mail client that could integrate with my school's terrible email server, which saved me from using their broken web client. Postbox has a clean (but not exactly minimal) interface, a nice way of displaying conversations, great attachment handling, is super stable, and has been around a long time.
- 616c 10y ago
  As a FLOSS supporter, I have been perturbed they charge money and let Thunderbird languish, just like I have been as an individual user all these years. Problem is I don't make a profit off it. Do they give back? I would like to stand corrected if I arrogantly assumed.
- schneidmaster 10y ago
  Yeah in hindsight it's obvious I should've mentioned this category, but as I mentioned in the article, I strongly prefer my email apps to be unified (i.e. both Mac + iOS available) and there are fewer and less interesting (IMO) Mac-only apps than iOS-only apps. Postbox is great if you're just looking for a stable, no-frills client that's desktop-only. I also use Mailplane sometimes (it's basically just a tabbed wrapper around the Gmail web interface).
- criddell 10y ago
  Postbox isn't keeping their version of the PGP add on current. They are still offering version 1.2 while Enigmail is up to 1.9 now. That's a showstopper for me.
pvinis 10y ago
While I also think email apps are not great, especially when trying to find a unified experience with macOS and iOS, I think CloudMagic for iOS is pretty good and Nylas N1 for macOS is also very good. maybe if N1 comes to iOS..
- schneidmaster 10y ago
  I haven't tried Nylan N1 yet, but I've heard some decent things about it. To be honest I don't usually bother trying apps unless they have an iOS version (whereas while not having a Mac version is still a dealbreaker, I'll still give it a try on iOS).
- dvcc 10y ago
  Nylas is pretty bug-ridden at this point, and they have committed to a pretty crazy pricing model ($7 per month). It's hard to get behind it.
  - schneidmaster 10y ago
    > they have committed to a pretty crazy pricing model ($7 per month) I actually sort of prefer email apps with this sort of pricing model; it makes me think they're trying to be financially sustainable rather than just getting acquihired in a year or two. I would definitely pay $7/mo for the right email app. (But I don't know if N1 is it; I added N1 and some other Mac-only email apps to the original article.)
- tjsix 10y ago
  I used Nylas for a while when it first came out and liked it alot. Then out of the blue one day I started to get errors that it couldn't/wouldn't sync, spent more time than I should've trying to get it to work again with no success, so I had to ditch it.
  - grinich 10y ago
    If you're willing to give it another go, I'd love to help debug this for you. Shoot me an email? (I work at Nylas.)
charlesz 10y ago
For what it's worth, I have been using Outlook for Mac for about a year now and have really enjoyed it. Categorizing emails by folder is, well, what Outlook has always done well and search is surprisingly good. Maybe I'm the odd one out, but I don't need any glitz and glam in my email client. I just want it to work and show me the email I want to see when I want to see it.
- 616c 10y ago
  It's all fun and games until you mirror the IMAP folder structure (what you sync with server) with local folders, break your Mac, and then import them into a new Mac and have to keep it all straight. Or you have to make a PST export on a Mac and do it on a PC? Given my job, I am relieved but terrified I have not even had to worry about it. I just looked it up and chuckled. Not a surprise this will screw you. http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/mac/forum/macoffice2011-macoutlook/can-i-export-outlook-for-mac-file-into-outlook-for/b505a2cc-6997-47f7-9e87-4ff57e17d97d?auth=1 http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/mac/forum/macoffice2011-m... Again, I said this before in another thread and stood in the middle of a minor flame. All email clients suck more than mutt. Do I love mutt? Not so much. But the developers have the serenity to accept that which they cannot change, and that the whole charade blows. (Does a day go by where we do not pounce on those who propose secure email, as a protocol and system? Forget the clients even.) That, and I have low self-esteem and relate to people who poke fun at themselves for sucking a little less since the beginning. [0] To relate it to a real technical issue. Mutt tries to be as nothing as possible, in terms of feature set and use case, while Outlook/Thunderbird/fat clients try to be everything. Someone likened Outlook to Emacs (which I love ironically), which I would say is true with a caveat. Something as intimate as correspondence and personal communication programming needs to be powerfully extensible and customizable, and none of the fat clients have good interfaces for that. Not even mutt does easily, and this is the core of the problem. Show me a world where everyone uses the same ink, pen, and paper to draft dead tree letters in the exactly style and preference and we can find an email that does not suck. (Hint: there never was one and never will be! Let the downvotes descend upon me!) [0] http://www.mutt.org/ http://www.mutt.org/ I pray they never change this beautiful site and its header.
  - 10y ago
na85 10y ago
Can one use k9 with Gmail? I've never tried.
- yaantc 10y ago
  Yes. Any IMAP client should work and I'm using K9 and TB successfully.
- 616c 10y ago
  Yes. I do for Google Apps now for years. Why I love it, server-side IMAP search, which means you use server-side search not the Gmail way, but as part of the IMAP protocol. Is it as fast and perfect? No. But I do not have to store so much damn email or increase the efficiency of Gmail's real-time tracking of my butt all over the world.
jackreichert 10y ago
I tried most of the ones on the list. I'm currently using [Spark](https://sparkmailapp.com/ https://sparkmailapp.com/) not as buggy as Airmail, mailbox many of the features I liked from both.
- jackreichert 10y ago
  My biggest gripe is that it doesn't integrate with their calendar app; which, I think is very silly.
- AlexandrB 10y ago
  I love Spark but they don't seem to have a clear way of making money so I'm concerned about its future.
- schneidmaster 10y ago
  I've tried Spark too; I kind've slotted it under the "others" in the "needs Mac app" category. I didn't really feel it did anything better than EasilyDo Mail (which has more personal assistant type features) or Boxer (which is more customizable) if I was going to go for an app on iOS only.
sorahn 10y ago
> My kingdom for a unified inbox and a Mac app. I would never leave Google Inbox again. It’s almost perfect – stable, amazing Google-powered search, snoozing by time and location, all the bells and whistles. I've used Fluid.app[1] to create 'standalone applications' of webpages. It's always worked great, and is almost what the OP is asking for for 'inbox'. [1]http://fluidapp.com/ http://fluidapp.com/
- schneidmaster 10y ago
  I've actually done this as well, but it's still not super satisfying. There's still no unified inbox so I have to have two tabs open in the Fluid app, and I don't get notifications or any nice native features like that. On that same grain, Boxy[1] is an unofficial Mac app wrapper for Inbox that adds notification support, but is even worse because it requires me to have a window open for each Gmail account (no tabbed interface). [1]: http://www.boxyapp.co/ http://www.boxyapp.co/
  - Frank2312 10y ago
    For notifications, there are many Chrome extensions that add that feature to Inbox. There may be extensions for other browsers as well, but I'm not sure about that. It would be nice if Google added native support for notifications like they did with GMail though.
- elsurudo 10y ago
  It's still very useful sometimes to have an offline copy of your mail, though. I also feel that email is something so integral that it should be a native app. I've been using Mail.app for years and it's not bad for my needs, but it doesn't have any fancy features, for sure. But the fact that it's native and works decently with mail providers and allows me to manage multiple inboxes quite easily is enough for now.
- wbthomason 10y ago
  There's also Wmail[1], which I've been using for the past few months. It's essentially just an Electron wrapper around the web app, with all that entails. It's worked fairly well for me, though, and enables easier inbox switching. [1]: http://thomas101.github.io/wmail/ http://thomas101.github.io/wmail/
chillaxtian 10y ago
just use mail.app
criddell 10y ago
This is off topic, but the typeface in that article looks terrible in Firefox on Windows 8.1. All of the lower case e's are missing the horizontal line: http://imgur.com/ShUxi15 http://imgur.com/ShUxi15 Does it look okay in your browser?
- schneidmaster 10y ago
  Hmmm that's not great. It looks fine for me in Firefox/Chrome on Mac. The base font is a Google webfont though (Merriweather) and sometimes I see those have random rendering problems for whatever reason.
  - speeder 10y ago
    I use palemoon. They are right now extremely upset that Google fonts is buggy, doesn't comply to standards, and Google not only refuses to fix it, but keep making changes that break palemoon workarounds. the project lead has seemly in the past months working more to create google font workarounds than on the rest of the browser.
    - schneidmaster 10y ago
      This doesn't really surprise me. I should really download the ttf's and such and font-face it myself. My blog is built on a Jekyll theme that I lightly modified and as I recall didn't mess with the fonts at all.
- gcb0 10y ago
  firefox motto is take back the web. start by disabling custom fonts. select decent defaults you like to stare at. done. perfect legibility, saved bandwidth, faster page load times, less data leakage to google (who magnanimously host all those fonts)
  - Nadya 10y ago
    I just realized I can be uniquely identified due to my personal font choice being a custom font by capturing the calculated value of font-family. I suppose I can rename the font to "Arial" and delete Arial and replace it with my custom font and call "Arial" instead of the proper font name. I wonder if that would actually break any programs that try and use Arial as the default font... hmm...
draw_down 10y ago
I just use gmail, it seems ok to me.
616c 10y ago
I will not beat a dead horse with my "mutt is superior because they know the best they cannot do is suck without confessing it" trope, but almost all email clients lack is Maildir. Even if you are not a technical user, you should respect the fact that proprietary formats will bite you. Look how many this guy alone used. If you use opensource, even, the mbox and mh all email, one giant file paradigm is all nice until it is corrupted. I wish more clients respected Maildir underneath, or tried to bend the truth on Windows FAT32 and NTFS ad the ; in path names limitation is a pain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maildir#Filesystem_Compatibility_Issues https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maildir#Filesystem_Compatibili... Sadly even Thunderbird has struggled to re-engineer a Maildir subsystem where it was never intended. Show me any email client devs who had the khutzpah to even dare that. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=845952 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=845952 But you have a lot of safety in spreading it across files, and you can throw dumber full text search at it, shell scripts, and a lot more flexibility over all. Sadly, some Unixisms will never escape Unix culture. As someone who has watched people screw 10+ years of email in Thunderbird n>1 times, I wish for the love of God everyone would use Maildir in the client, regardless of interface, free or not, et cetera.
- ksk 10y ago
  I don't agree with you. Like with anything else, less abstraction = more performance. Creating a specific/targeted way to index, store and manage email data has its benefits too. I'd hazard a guess that most proprietary formats are similar to the maildir format. Its just that the individual files are opqaue at the filesystem level. If you create thousands of tiny files then you are hoping that the file system design - which like any other design can only be optimized for specific workloads - can handle it better than a database type format specifically designed for email. Then again a generic full text search system (which probably won't even know that they're email files) over those thousands of files would have to be better than a targeted design for email data. You would miss certain optimizations like.. (making one up now) extracting and storing just the email headers in a separate region to speed up indexing and having some indirection built in to lookup that specific email.
  - gary_bernhardt 10y ago
dimgl 10y ago
Mail.app is fine for me... What am I missing in an email client that Mail.app doesn't provide?
- wilkystyle 10y ago
  From the article: "[...] it’s buggy and crashy, it needs to update my email library every few months when I open it (why does my email need a library?), and it lacks any sort of innovative feature set (or even support for things like snoozing)."
  - stephenr 10y ago
    And yet none of us seem to see those issues. I can remember mail.app needing to rebuild a mailbox to a new format maybe twice or three times, since probably 2008. 1 person saying "x is buggy and crashes" doesn't mean much without actual descriptions of the problem.
    - schneidmaster 10y ago
      I mean, if you like Mail.app, use Mail.app. I'm not here to tell you that you should change how you read your email if you're satisfied with it. I was pithy in the Mail.app section because the article was already shaping up to be quite long and I just sort of assume everyone in the Apple ecosystem has used Mail.app at least a bit and knows its strengths and shortcomings already.
      - stephenr 10y ago
        > knows its strengths and shortcomings already. I've used mail.app since I've used OS X, and I wouldn't describe any version I've used as particularly "buggy" or "crashy"
    - superchink 10y ago
      Not to pile on, but Mail.app has seemed the most predictable and consistently performing (with search and basic usage) of all of the clients I have used, including most of those mentioned in the article. I realize this is just one data point, but as unpopular as your perspective is, stephenr, I share it.
kebolio 10y ago
Geary is actually quite a nice e-mail client to use if you use GNOME or something close to GNOME (Unity, Cinnamon, Pantheon).
binaryanomaly 10y ago
I'm pretty happy... OSX: Mail.app does the job very well, little bloat. Linux: I like Geary. Lean but not as good as Mail.app though Windows: Mailbird. Light but also not as good as Mail.app For Business I have Outlook. None is perfect but all do what I need in the corresponding context.
free2rhyme214 10y ago
I've used Gmail since 2004, when they had invites and everyone wanted one. I use Outlook for iOS at work and think it's great, although there's issues getting signatures to transfer when your company uses Sharepoint. Email is a non issue for most people because most people just use a web browser and a mobile app. For the record, I wasn't impressed with Outlook for the Mac.
chasing 10y ago
Every time I experiment with a new e-mail client, I return fairly quickly to Mail.app. I like Mail.app. Maybe that's a personal deficiency.
- schneidmaster 10y ago
  It's not a deficiency, I'm a firm believer in people using what they enjoy. Life is far too short to tell people they're wrong because of what they use to read their email.
- tomelders 10y ago
  Give me a decent way to digg out and manage attachments and I'd be over the moon.
  - AdieuToLogic 10y ago
    As far as digging out attachments across multiple messages in Mail.app (described here[0]): - Select a group of messages (could be Command-A in a smart folder, for example). - Then choose "File -> Save Attachments..." - Finally, choose or create a directory where you'd like the attachments to reside. As for managing them, I would imagine that would vary for each person in how they like to work and what they seek to accomplish. 0 - http://email.about.com/od/macosxmailtips/qt/How-to-Save-All-Attachments-from-Multiple-Emails-Fast-in-OS-X-Mail.htm http://email.about.com/od/macosxmailtips/qt/How-to-Save-All-...
  - grinich 10y ago
    Have you seen "Filed" by Emmerge? https://medium.com/posts-from-emmerge/filed-an-ai-assistant-that-saves-and-organizes-your-email-files-in-dropbox-or-box-2e203b1d4c42#.pv3zu3xou https://medium.com/posts-from-emmerge/filed-an-ai-assistant-...
captn3m0 10y ago
A friend uses MailMate[0]. It seems to be a bit pricey (50 USD), but considering it shot the fundraising campaign for the next release by 170%[1], I'm sure there are fans here. [0]: https://freron.com/ https://freron.com/ [1]: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mailmate-2-0-the-email-client-for-the-rest-of-us#/ https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mailmate-2-0-the-email-cl...
- aeonflux 10y ago
  I use this app every day and never heard about the campaign. I guess their marking wasn't really top notch, which even makes the shot even more impressing.
aeonflux 10y ago
I tried all mentioned in the post and comments. I am currently using MailMate (https://freron.com/ https://freron.com/) It is still lacking, but does most of the things I personally need.
awesomerobot 10y ago
email by definition sucks
- mrweasel 10y ago
  Why? I haven't seen a single alternative, ever, that comes close to providing the flexibility, versatility or openness of email. Despite the ability to be pretty much what ever you want it to be, it's still a remarkable simple protocol. Really the only thing email is lacking is good end-to-end encryption. People suck at writing emails though. I partially blame Outlook, but also the unwillingness to wanting to read and write well. So much of the hassle of email has to do with volume and the sender not re-reading their writing before hitting send.
  - grinich 10y ago
    If you're looking for a modern integration with PGP, you might consider checking out the recent update of N1. More on that here: https://nylas.com/blog/pgp https://nylas.com/blog/pgp (I work at Nylas.)
xavi 10y ago
On the other hand iOS doesn't really support the use of alternatives to the built-in Mail app. I was trying Google Inbox in a new iPad where I didn't configure the built-in Mail, but then I wanted to mail a link to a web page from Safari and I couldn't. It seems is not possible to tell iOS or Safari that I want my emails to be sent through Inbox :(
- JimDabell 10y ago
  > I was trying Google Inbox in a new iPad where I didn't configure the built-in Mail, but then I wanted to mail a link to a web page from Safari and I couldn't. Sure you can – tap on the share button, then scroll to the Gmail icon and tap on it. A new email will be started in the Gmail application containing the page title and URL. If you don't see the Gmail icon straight away, scroll to the end of the list, and tap on More… to add Gmail to the list.
SmileyKeith 10y ago
Here's another new one to try http://dejalu.me/ http://dejalu.me/ (from one of the creators of Sparrow)
carsongross 10y ago
The problem is the economics of non-SAS applications: getting an email client right is hard and the free alternatives are good enough for plebe-tier users. $4.99 a one-time pop isn't going to get it done.
thallukrish 10y ago
I feel Email has evolved organically since eons and what we have today is like the way humans have evolved over millions of years. While the standard look and feel remains the same pretty much, it has become one's identity for receiving messages on the web of all forms and types, of all needs from commerce to friends to business. It is also a database of all our past communications. Apart that mobile adds further complexity. It is likely that any one answer for it can miss out things in the enthusiasm to bring out a simpler version or in the over-enthusiasm to make it complicated than what it should. It is hard to quantify the "needs" as it caters to a wide audience as a one stop answer. Slack like app can take away the professional side, or a Facebook can take away the social side, but no matter what, you still need a email as it serves as the identity to reach out for the Web applications. So whoever is building a new email App needs to keep all of this in mind and come out with something nifty yet powerful.

52 points by schneidmaster 10y ago

No mention of Postbox (https://www.postbox-inc.com https://www.postbox-inc.com)? It's based on Thunderbird, but has very good support for conversations and archiving (Gmail-like workflow) even for non-Gmail providers. It also has nice native looking styles for macOS and Windows. For me, it is one of the best clients... although I use primarily windows and sometimes Linux (where it works fine with wine), so I can't try the macOS-only ones.

robgering 10y ago
Have to recommend Postbox as well. It is the only mail client that could integrate with my school's terrible email server, which saved me from using their broken web client. Postbox has a clean (but not exactly minimal) interface, a nice way of displaying conversations, great attachment handling, is super stable, and has been around a long time.
616c 10y ago
As a FLOSS supporter, I have been perturbed they charge money and let Thunderbird languish, just like I have been as an individual user all these years. Problem is I don't make a profit off it. Do they give back? I would like to stand corrected if I arrogantly assumed.
schneidmaster 10y ago
Yeah in hindsight it's obvious I should've mentioned this category, but as I mentioned in the article, I strongly prefer my email apps to be unified (i.e. both Mac + iOS available) and there are fewer and less interesting (IMO) Mac-only apps than iOS-only apps. Postbox is great if you're just looking for a stable, no-frills client that's desktop-only. I also use Mailplane sometimes (it's basically just a tabbed wrapper around the Gmail web interface).
criddell 10y ago
Postbox isn't keeping their version of the PGP add on current. They are still offering version 1.2 while Enigmail is up to 1.9 now. That's a showstopper for me.

pvinis 10y ago

While I also think email apps are not great, especially when trying to find a unified experience with macOS and iOS, I think CloudMagic for iOS is pretty good and Nylas N1 for macOS is also very good. maybe if N1 comes to iOS..

schneidmaster 10y ago
I haven't tried Nylan N1 yet, but I've heard some decent things about it. To be honest I don't usually bother trying apps unless they have an iOS version (whereas while not having a Mac version is still a dealbreaker, I'll still give it a try on iOS).
dvcc 10y ago
Nylas is pretty bug-ridden at this point, and they have committed to a pretty crazy pricing model ($7 per month). It's hard to get behind it.
- schneidmaster 10y ago
  > they have committed to a pretty crazy pricing model ($7 per month) I actually sort of prefer email apps with this sort of pricing model; it makes me think they're trying to be financially sustainable rather than just getting acquihired in a year or two. I would definitely pay $7/mo for the right email app. (But I don't know if N1 is it; I added N1 and some other Mac-only email apps to the original article.)
tjsix 10y ago
I used Nylas for a while when it first came out and liked it alot. Then out of the blue one day I started to get errors that it couldn't/wouldn't sync, spent more time than I should've trying to get it to work again with no success, so I had to ditch it.
- grinich 10y ago
  If you're willing to give it another go, I'd love to help debug this for you. Shoot me an email? (I work at Nylas.)

charlesz 10y ago

For what it's worth, I have been using Outlook for Mac for about a year now and have really enjoyed it. Categorizing emails by folder is, well, what Outlook has always done well and search is surprisingly good. Maybe I'm the odd one out, but I don't need any glitz and glam in my email client. I just want it to work and show me the email I want to see when I want to see it.

616c 10y ago
It's all fun and games until you mirror the IMAP folder structure (what you sync with server) with local folders, break your Mac, and then import them into a new Mac and have to keep it all straight. Or you have to make a PST export on a Mac and do it on a PC? Given my job, I am relieved but terrified I have not even had to worry about it. I just looked it up and chuckled. Not a surprise this will screw you. http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/mac/forum/macoffice2011-macoutlook/can-i-export-outlook-for-mac-file-into-outlook-for/b505a2cc-6997-47f7-9e87-4ff57e17d97d?auth=1 http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/mac/forum/macoffice2011-m... Again, I said this before in another thread and stood in the middle of a minor flame. All email clients suck more than mutt. Do I love mutt? Not so much. But the developers have the serenity to accept that which they cannot change, and that the whole charade blows. (Does a day go by where we do not pounce on those who propose secure email, as a protocol and system? Forget the clients even.) That, and I have low self-esteem and relate to people who poke fun at themselves for sucking a little less since the beginning. [0] To relate it to a real technical issue. Mutt tries to be as nothing as possible, in terms of feature set and use case, while Outlook/Thunderbird/fat clients try to be everything. Someone likened Outlook to Emacs (which I love ironically), which I would say is true with a caveat. Something as intimate as correspondence and personal communication programming needs to be powerfully extensible and customizable, and none of the fat clients have good interfaces for that. Not even mutt does easily, and this is the core of the problem. Show me a world where everyone uses the same ink, pen, and paper to draft dead tree letters in the exactly style and preference and we can find an email that does not suck. (Hint: there never was one and never will be! Let the downvotes descend upon me!) [0] http://www.mutt.org/ http://www.mutt.org/ I pray they never change this beautiful site and its header.
- 10y ago

na85 10y ago

Can one use k9 with Gmail? I've never tried.

yaantc 10y ago
Yes. Any IMAP client should work and I'm using K9 and TB successfully.
616c 10y ago
Yes. I do for Google Apps now for years. Why I love it, server-side IMAP search, which means you use server-side search not the Gmail way, but as part of the IMAP protocol. Is it as fast and perfect? No. But I do not have to store so much damn email or increase the efficiency of Gmail's real-time tracking of my butt all over the world.

jackreichert 10y ago

I tried most of the ones on the list. I'm currently using [Spark](https://sparkmailapp.com/ https://sparkmailapp.com/) not as buggy as Airmail, mailbox many of the features I liked from both.

jackreichert 10y ago
My biggest gripe is that it doesn't integrate with their calendar app; which, I think is very silly.
AlexandrB 10y ago
I love Spark but they don't seem to have a clear way of making money so I'm concerned about its future.
schneidmaster 10y ago
I've tried Spark too; I kind've slotted it under the "others" in the "needs Mac app" category. I didn't really feel it did anything better than EasilyDo Mail (which has more personal assistant type features) or Boxer (which is more customizable) if I was going to go for an app on iOS only.

sorahn 10y ago

> My kingdom for a unified inbox and a Mac app. I would never leave Google Inbox again. It’s almost perfect – stable, amazing Google-powered search, snoozing by time and location, all the bells and whistles. I've used Fluid.app[1] to create 'standalone applications' of webpages. It's always worked great, and is almost what the OP is asking for for 'inbox'. [1]http://fluidapp.com/ http://fluidapp.com/

schneidmaster 10y ago
I've actually done this as well, but it's still not super satisfying. There's still no unified inbox so I have to have two tabs open in the Fluid app, and I don't get notifications or any nice native features like that. On that same grain, Boxy[1] is an unofficial Mac app wrapper for Inbox that adds notification support, but is even worse because it requires me to have a window open for each Gmail account (no tabbed interface). [1]: http://www.boxyapp.co/ http://www.boxyapp.co/
- Frank2312 10y ago
  For notifications, there are many Chrome extensions that add that feature to Inbox. There may be extensions for other browsers as well, but I'm not sure about that. It would be nice if Google added native support for notifications like they did with GMail though.
elsurudo 10y ago
It's still very useful sometimes to have an offline copy of your mail, though. I also feel that email is something so integral that it should be a native app. I've been using Mail.app for years and it's not bad for my needs, but it doesn't have any fancy features, for sure. But the fact that it's native and works decently with mail providers and allows me to manage multiple inboxes quite easily is enough for now.
wbthomason 10y ago
There's also Wmail[1], which I've been using for the past few months. It's essentially just an Electron wrapper around the web app, with all that entails. It's worked fairly well for me, though, and enables easier inbox switching. [1]: http://thomas101.github.io/wmail/ http://thomas101.github.io/wmail/

chillaxtian 10y ago

just use mail.app

criddell 10y ago

This is off topic, but the typeface in that article looks terrible in Firefox on Windows 8.1. All of the lower case e's are missing the horizontal line: http://imgur.com/ShUxi15 http://imgur.com/ShUxi15 Does it look okay in your browser?

schneidmaster 10y ago
Hmmm that's not great. It looks fine for me in Firefox/Chrome on Mac. The base font is a Google webfont though (Merriweather) and sometimes I see those have random rendering problems for whatever reason.
- speeder 10y ago
  I use palemoon. They are right now extremely upset that Google fonts is buggy, doesn't comply to standards, and Google not only refuses to fix it, but keep making changes that break palemoon workarounds. the project lead has seemly in the past months working more to create google font workarounds than on the rest of the browser.
  - schneidmaster 10y ago
    This doesn't really surprise me. I should really download the ttf's and such and font-face it myself. My blog is built on a Jekyll theme that I lightly modified and as I recall didn't mess with the fonts at all.
gcb0 10y ago
firefox motto is take back the web. start by disabling custom fonts. select decent defaults you like to stare at. done. perfect legibility, saved bandwidth, faster page load times, less data leakage to google (who magnanimously host all those fonts)
- Nadya 10y ago
  I just realized I can be uniquely identified due to my personal font choice being a custom font by capturing the calculated value of font-family. I suppose I can rename the font to "Arial" and delete Arial and replace it with my custom font and call "Arial" instead of the proper font name. I wonder if that would actually break any programs that try and use Arial as the default font... hmm...

draw_down 10y ago

I just use gmail, it seems ok to me.

616c 10y ago

I will not beat a dead horse with my "mutt is superior because they know the best they cannot do is suck without confessing it" trope, but almost all email clients lack is Maildir. Even if you are not a technical user, you should respect the fact that proprietary formats will bite you. Look how many this guy alone used. If you use opensource, even, the mbox and mh all email, one giant file paradigm is all nice until it is corrupted. I wish more clients respected Maildir underneath, or tried to bend the truth on Windows FAT32 and NTFS ad the ; in path names limitation is a pain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maildir#Filesystem_Compatibility_Issues https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maildir#Filesystem_Compatibili... Sadly even Thunderbird has struggled to re-engineer a Maildir subsystem where it was never intended. Show me any email client devs who had the khutzpah to even dare that. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=845952 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=845952 But you have a lot of safety in spreading it across files, and you can throw dumber full text search at it, shell scripts, and a lot more flexibility over all. Sadly, some Unixisms will never escape Unix culture. As someone who has watched people screw 10+ years of email in Thunderbird n>1 times, I wish for the love of God everyone would use Maildir in the client, regardless of interface, free or not, et cetera.

ksk 10y ago
I don't agree with you. Like with anything else, less abstraction = more performance. Creating a specific/targeted way to index, store and manage email data has its benefits too. I'd hazard a guess that most proprietary formats are similar to the maildir format. Its just that the individual files are opqaue at the filesystem level. If you create thousands of tiny files then you are hoping that the file system design - which like any other design can only be optimized for specific workloads - can handle it better than a database type format specifically designed for email. Then again a generic full text search system (which probably won't even know that they're email files) over those thousands of files would have to be better than a targeted design for email data. You would miss certain optimizations like.. (making one up now) extracting and storing just the email headers in a separate region to speed up indexing and having some indirection built in to lookup that specific email.
- gary_bernhardt 10y ago

dimgl 10y ago

Mail.app is fine for me... What am I missing in an email client that Mail.app doesn't provide?

wilkystyle 10y ago
From the article: "[...] it’s buggy and crashy, it needs to update my email library every few months when I open it (why does my email need a library?), and it lacks any sort of innovative feature set (or even support for things like snoozing)."
- stephenr 10y ago
  And yet none of us seem to see those issues. I can remember mail.app needing to rebuild a mailbox to a new format maybe twice or three times, since probably 2008. 1 person saying "x is buggy and crashes" doesn't mean much without actual descriptions of the problem.
  - schneidmaster 10y ago
    I mean, if you like Mail.app, use Mail.app. I'm not here to tell you that you should change how you read your email if you're satisfied with it. I was pithy in the Mail.app section because the article was already shaping up to be quite long and I just sort of assume everyone in the Apple ecosystem has used Mail.app at least a bit and knows its strengths and shortcomings already.
    - stephenr 10y ago
      > knows its strengths and shortcomings already. I've used mail.app since I've used OS X, and I wouldn't describe any version I've used as particularly "buggy" or "crashy"
  - superchink 10y ago
    Not to pile on, but Mail.app has seemed the most predictable and consistently performing (with search and basic usage) of all of the clients I have used, including most of those mentioned in the article. I realize this is just one data point, but as unpopular as your perspective is, stephenr, I share it.

kebolio 10y ago

Geary is actually quite a nice e-mail client to use if you use GNOME or something close to GNOME (Unity, Cinnamon, Pantheon).

binaryanomaly 10y ago

I'm pretty happy... OSX: Mail.app does the job very well, little bloat. Linux: I like Geary. Lean but not as good as Mail.app though Windows: Mailbird. Light but also not as good as Mail.app For Business I have Outlook. None is perfect but all do what I need in the corresponding context.

free2rhyme214 10y ago

I've used Gmail since 2004, when they had invites and everyone wanted one. I use Outlook for iOS at work and think it's great, although there's issues getting signatures to transfer when your company uses Sharepoint. Email is a non issue for most people because most people just use a web browser and a mobile app. For the record, I wasn't impressed with Outlook for the Mac.

chasing 10y ago

Every time I experiment with a new e-mail client, I return fairly quickly to Mail.app. I like Mail.app. Maybe that's a personal deficiency.

schneidmaster 10y ago
It's not a deficiency, I'm a firm believer in people using what they enjoy. Life is far too short to tell people they're wrong because of what they use to read their email.
tomelders 10y ago
Give me a decent way to digg out and manage attachments and I'd be over the moon.
- AdieuToLogic 10y ago
  As far as digging out attachments across multiple messages in Mail.app (described here[0]): - Select a group of messages (could be Command-A in a smart folder, for example). - Then choose "File -> Save Attachments..." - Finally, choose or create a directory where you'd like the attachments to reside. As for managing them, I would imagine that would vary for each person in how they like to work and what they seek to accomplish. 0 - http://email.about.com/od/macosxmailtips/qt/How-to-Save-All-Attachments-from-Multiple-Emails-Fast-in-OS-X-Mail.htm http://email.about.com/od/macosxmailtips/qt/How-to-Save-All-...
- grinich 10y ago
  Have you seen "Filed" by Emmerge? https://medium.com/posts-from-emmerge/filed-an-ai-assistant-that-saves-and-organizes-your-email-files-in-dropbox-or-box-2e203b1d4c42#.pv3zu3xou https://medium.com/posts-from-emmerge/filed-an-ai-assistant-...

captn3m0 10y ago

A friend uses MailMate[0]. It seems to be a bit pricey (50 USD), but considering it shot the fundraising campaign for the next release by 170%[1], I'm sure there are fans here. [0]: https://freron.com/ https://freron.com/ [1]: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mailmate-2-0-the-email-client-for-the-rest-of-us#/ https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mailmate-2-0-the-email-cl...

aeonflux 10y ago
I use this app every day and never heard about the campaign. I guess their marking wasn't really top notch, which even makes the shot even more impressing.

aeonflux 10y ago

I tried all mentioned in the post and comments. I am currently using MailMate (https://freron.com/ https://freron.com/) It is still lacking, but does most of the things I personally need.

awesomerobot 10y ago

email by definition sucks

mrweasel 10y ago
Why? I haven't seen a single alternative, ever, that comes close to providing the flexibility, versatility or openness of email. Despite the ability to be pretty much what ever you want it to be, it's still a remarkable simple protocol. Really the only thing email is lacking is good end-to-end encryption. People suck at writing emails though. I partially blame Outlook, but also the unwillingness to wanting to read and write well. So much of the hassle of email has to do with volume and the sender not re-reading their writing before hitting send.
- grinich 10y ago
  If you're looking for a modern integration with PGP, you might consider checking out the recent update of N1. More on that here: https://nylas.com/blog/pgp https://nylas.com/blog/pgp (I work at Nylas.)

xavi 10y ago

On the other hand iOS doesn't really support the use of alternatives to the built-in Mail app. I was trying Google Inbox in a new iPad where I didn't configure the built-in Mail, but then I wanted to mail a link to a web page from Safari and I couldn't. It seems is not possible to tell iOS or Safari that I want my emails to be sent through Inbox :(

JimDabell 10y ago
> I was trying Google Inbox in a new iPad where I didn't configure the built-in Mail, but then I wanted to mail a link to a web page from Safari and I couldn't. Sure you can – tap on the share button, then scroll to the Gmail icon and tap on it. A new email will be started in the Gmail application containing the page title and URL. If you don't see the Gmail icon straight away, scroll to the end of the list, and tap on More… to add Gmail to the list.

SmileyKeith 10y ago

Here's another new one to try http://dejalu.me/ http://dejalu.me/ (from one of the creators of Sparrow)

carsongross 10y ago

The problem is the economics of non-SAS applications: getting an email client right is hard and the free alternatives are good enough for plebe-tier users. $4.99 a one-time pop isn't going to get it done.

thallukrish 10y ago

I feel Email has evolved organically since eons and what we have today is like the way humans have evolved over millions of years. While the standard look and feel remains the same pretty much, it has become one's identity for receiving messages on the web of all forms and types, of all needs from commerce to friends to business. It is also a database of all our past communications. Apart that mobile adds further complexity. It is likely that any one answer for it can miss out things in the enthusiasm to bring out a simpler version or in the over-enthusiasm to make it complicated than what it should. It is hard to quantify the "needs" as it caters to a wide audience as a one stop answer. Slack like app can take away the professional side, or a Facebook can take away the social side, but no matter what, you still need a email as it serves as the identity to reach out for the Web applications. So whoever is building a new email App needs to keep all of this in mind and come out with something nifty yet powerful.