Ask HN: What email client do you use?

Airmail on OS X.

Ooooh this hits a sore point with me this week.

I have used gmail to date simply because I must have a synched service between laptop and mobile. So gmail was just there as a IMAP/SMTP server for the iPhone mail reader

However as pg has pointed out, and the pretty good ActiveInbox implemented (hey ActiveInbox - apply for YC!) a mail inbox is really a task list.

And it must be linked to a contact book. All of which must be integrated at the event level.

So which mail client I use is less of the question than how do I solve

* capturing and synching contact details, contact events, email messages and tags across all these

I have a workable solution in gmail now, but I cannot capture events on my iPhone. Android appraently does so I will switch but its not all tied together neatly.

I have played with mutt and goobook but frankly I can see a good couple of weeks disappearing down this rathole. Yet it should be a solved problem. VCards, iCal, X-Headers, the solution is there. It just seems there is no RFC we can agree on

my rant on this subject: http://blog.mikadosoftware.com/2013/09/17/help-i-cannot-find...

Edit: am I just ill-informed (!) or has there really been no successful standardisation for "managing contact details events and tasks in a mailbox?"

I still use sparrow; love that app.

I haven't found anyone else who uses it surprisingly, but Gmail Offline (Chrome App). I use it when online. It has amazing keyboard shortcuts (faster than Gmail proper), and then of course you get the perk that the data is offline once you hit the train. Actually, I think the keyboard shortcuts might be the only reason I use it...

Since apparently everyone uses nothing but gmail, I think I am in minority by using Thunderbird consistently through years.

I use gmail, yahoo mail (through an extension), connect several pop3(I tell it to leave messages onn server), imap servers for work (for which emails are occasionally harvested and sold to spammers somehow..) and my own mail server (Hey, I am a web developer. No excuse to not have a el cheapo vps with webserver and an email servers combo), local maildir and mbox delivery for testing crap I write, several newsgroups and a shitloads of RSS/Atom feeds. It also has some xmpp integration of dubious usability. I also have Lightning extension which is supposed to behave as a calendar but I am a disorganised person and rarely check email by contemporary standard of every five minutes, whole day. Oh, and local spam detection.

Sure I look forward to Mailpile (just checked the marketing blurb) which promises to not show me ads and perform faster than "cloud" while offering all the features that should exist in practice to justify calling itself an email client. Competition is good and thunderbird is going senile by every passing day anyway.

I hope they won't spin off their custom web server as a standalone project too.