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Ask HN: Best email client for a Mac?

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41–50 of 73 posts

Re: Ask HN: Best email client for a Mac?

#41
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.

Re: Ask HN: Best email client for a Mac?

#43
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It gets quite slow with large mailboxes.

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.

I have about 20k messages in my All Mail and around 5k in inbox, and it's pretty unwieldy. Usable, but definitely slow switching mailboxes, slow at searching, slow at sorting and filtering, slow to bring up message windows and so on. It's more UI lag than anything else.

It is a very fast mail client with near empty mailboxes.

Re: Ask HN: Best email client for a Mac?

#44
post #26

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, Yah…

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.

Re: Ask HN: Best email client for a Mac?

#45
post #6

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

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

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.

Re: Ask HN: Best email client for a Mac?

#46
post #44
post #26

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, Yah…

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.

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).

Re: Ask HN: Best email client for a Mac?

#48
post #41

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…

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

Re: Ask HN: Best email client for a Mac?

#50
post #26

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, Yah…

$50!?
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