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Mail.app on macOS. Some macOS apps are really great (Notes or Safari for example), but the average quality is poor. Mail, for example, is slow, search almost ne

by _____s 6y ago

Mail.app on macOS. Some macOS apps are really great (Notes or Safari for example), but the average quality is poor. Mail, for example, is slow, search almost never works, etc.

DenseComet 6y ago
I'm also using Mail.app right now and I've been having similar issues with search and stuff. Does anyone have any recommendations for good desktop email apps on macOS?
- dnh44 6y ago
  Interesting I’ve always thought mail.app has had amazingly good search. I recently moved away from it though because I wanted a more flexible workflow and tried a quite a few other clients. The “pretty” macOS mail apps had not very good search functionality so they were unusable for me. In the end I went with Mailmate and I’m extremely happy with it.
- IlGrigiore 6y ago
  I like to use Mailspring [https://getmailspring.com https://getmailspring.com]. It does what it needs to do, without too much fuss. The UX is clear and I can connect multiple email accounts and use the unified inbox without any issue. I am in no way affiliated to the product.
- antepodius 6y ago
  Try mutt. Classic, simple, scriptable, it's got everything you could ever want! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutt_(email_client) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutt_(email_client) Depends on your definition of 'desktop', of course ;)
- techslave 6y ago
  outlook. everything is looks good but littered with bugs and exceptionally weak dev teams behind it.
Jaxan 6y ago
I have used Mail.app and the default mail app on windows 10 a lot. Can you believe that the default windows mail app is even worse? Very basic features are still missing after many years...
dschuessler 6y ago
I have a love/hate relationship with Mail. It has exactly the feature set and UI I would want from a mail application. But god, these bugs. Somwhere down the line it became strangely slow. It's constantly displaying false values on how many emails it is about to fetch. And I accidentally deleted emails on more than one occasion without having a clue on how that happened.
boulos 6y ago
I remain convinced that somewhere inside of Mail.app someone decided to try to speed up search with some approximate index or badly rewritten strcasecmp. Mail not being able to properly find an exact string match correctly means I had to give up and just use GMail in Chrome and on iOS. Once GMail on iOS added IMAP and SMTP, I never needed to go back.
oneplane 6y ago
I'm also using Mail.app on my macs and while I never had those problems I do see people complaining about those things a lot and I'm curious what would cause that. Apple's radar/bugreport/feedback stuff is hidden so that's somewhat sad (but understandable) but maybe it turns out most people have the same problem due to similar context (account setup, data in use or something...). The most heavily loaded Mail.app I seem to have is one with two MS Exchange accounts, iCloud, a couple of IMAP accounts and a single POP account. I generally archive everything older than ~10 months out of my inbox leaving a combined 43k messages in that virtual inbox 'group'. Maybe people with larger message stores trigger some programming fault?
- _____s 6y ago
  Possible. For me, it's a bunch of small things. I have three mailboxes. For one, search is almost always slow and incorrect. To the point where I usually have to load Gmail's web UI to be confident that I haven't missed anything. It's strange because I like a lot of what Mail.app does—it's simple, no bells and whistles—but the search experience, etc. just ruins it entirely.
  - oneplane 6y ago
    Some of the IMAP accounts I have are also Gmail and GSuite accounts, search seems to work fine (both from the global search thing and per-account). Or maybe I'm actually missing results but I don't know about them because I'm not seeing them (but somehow still finding what I need).

by _____s 6y ago

Mail.app on macOS. Some macOS apps are really great (Notes or Safari for example), but the average quality is poor. Mail, for example, is slow, search almost never works, etc.

DenseComet 6y ago

I'm also using Mail.app right now and I've been having similar issues with search and stuff. Does anyone have any recommendations for good desktop email apps on macOS?

dnh44 6y ago
Interesting I’ve always thought mail.app has had amazingly good search. I recently moved away from it though because I wanted a more flexible workflow and tried a quite a few other clients. The “pretty” macOS mail apps had not very good search functionality so they were unusable for me. In the end I went with Mailmate and I’m extremely happy with it.
IlGrigiore 6y ago
I like to use Mailspring [https://getmailspring.com https://getmailspring.com]. It does what it needs to do, without too much fuss. The UX is clear and I can connect multiple email accounts and use the unified inbox without any issue. I am in no way affiliated to the product.
antepodius 6y ago
Try mutt. Classic, simple, scriptable, it's got everything you could ever want! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutt_(email_client) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutt_(email_client) Depends on your definition of 'desktop', of course ;)
techslave 6y ago
outlook. everything is looks good but littered with bugs and exceptionally weak dev teams behind it.

Jaxan 6y ago

I have used Mail.app and the default mail app on windows 10 a lot. Can you believe that the default windows mail app is even worse? Very basic features are still missing after many years...

dschuessler 6y ago

I have a love/hate relationship with Mail. It has exactly the feature set and UI I would want from a mail application. But god, these bugs. Somwhere down the line it became strangely slow. It's constantly displaying false values on how many emails it is about to fetch. And I accidentally deleted emails on more than one occasion without having a clue on how that happened.

boulos 6y ago

I remain convinced that somewhere inside of Mail.app someone decided to try to speed up search with some approximate index or badly rewritten strcasecmp. Mail not being able to properly find an exact string match correctly means I had to give up and just use GMail in Chrome and on iOS. Once GMail on iOS added IMAP and SMTP, I never needed to go back.

oneplane 6y ago

I'm also using Mail.app on my macs and while I never had those problems I do see people complaining about those things a lot and I'm curious what would cause that. Apple's radar/bugreport/feedback stuff is hidden so that's somewhat sad (but understandable) but maybe it turns out most people have the same problem due to similar context (account setup, data in use or something...). The most heavily loaded Mail.app I seem to have is one with two MS Exchange accounts, iCloud, a couple of IMAP accounts and a single POP account. I generally archive everything older than ~10 months out of my inbox leaving a combined 43k messages in that virtual inbox 'group'. Maybe people with larger message stores trigger some programming fault?

_____s 6y ago
Possible. For me, it's a bunch of small things. I have three mailboxes. For one, search is almost always slow and incorrect. To the point where I usually have to load Gmail's web UI to be confident that I haven't missed anything. It's strange because I like a lot of what Mail.app does—it's simple, no bells and whistles—but the search experience, etc. just ruins it entirely.
- oneplane 6y ago
  Some of the IMAP accounts I have are also Gmail and GSuite accounts, search seems to work fine (both from the global search thing and per-account). Or maybe I'm actually missing results but I don't know about them because I'm not seeing them (but somehow still finding what I need).