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Ask HN: Best email client for a Mac?

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51–60 of 73 posts

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

#52
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have mailboxes with over 70-100k messages in them in Mail.app, and they never take longer than about 0.5-2.5 seconds to load up when switching to them (the higher range being when the system is also under load).

I have a few small gripes with Mail.app (it occasionally claims that some messages are unread that aren't, for instance), but nothing I've seen of other mail clients has led me to think they'd ever be better for my workflow.

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

#53
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…

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

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

#54
post #2

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

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.

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

#55

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.

It gets quite slow with large mailboxes.

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?

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

#57
post #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.

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

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

#58
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.

You can set up those in Gmail directly.

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

#59
post #8

Postbox is pretty swell.

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.

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

#60
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!?

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.
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