Mail Pilot 2 for Mac | Hacker News Reader

Mail Pilot 2 for Mac

mindsense.co

53 pointsArtemis255 comments

I loved sparrow, bought sparrow. It got acquired and went away. I loved mailbox, used mailbox. It got acquired and is more and more unusable with every "update". I would love to love this, but I've been hurt before.

Felt the exact same pains. That's what keeps me from investing in these newer clients.

Out of curiosity, what email client are you using now?

Not the OP, but if he’s still looking, I’d recommend he give MailMate¹ a try. In my opinion, it’s been the best mail client on OS X for a while now.

――――――

¹ — http://freron.com/

I'm still hanging on to mailbox. I'm giving them another iteration cycle or two to fix stuff. So far their product and support has been very underwhelming. I still like their iphone app.

Hey there - CEO here! No acquisition plans, that's why we started on Kickstarter and have yet to take any outside investment.

We're here for the long haul! Looking to solve problems with more than just Mail Pilot, too - check out Throttle (https://throttlehq.com) for example.

We'd be happy to answer any questions you have.

Your client a spin. Looks interesting.

On a side note I built something like throttlehq back in 2009. I even made one of those zany animated how-it-works videos that were popular at the time. https://youtu.be/SLJHPMxgAWU?t=14s site is down, but here's the source https://github.com/schneems/WhySpam. It didn't work out so well.

Around the same time another company called OtherInbox had a really similar product. They've shut theirs down due to lack of monetization.

I like the button right in the form with the extension, that's a nice touch.

Much more informative video for throttle than mail pilot.

However, I think the major pain for me is getting control of my current inbox. Just getting an overview of who has my email, who sends what and how often, is extremely hard.

Secondly it would be difficult to choose who to give my throttle mail and my real mail address to.

I don't want the Amazon spam mails, but I still want to know what to type when I log in to their website.

Other, trickier, problems I don't know how to solve:

I want updates from my coursera course, but not from coursera. Actually that's the same with Amazon: I want them to send my receipt, but not the monthly/weekly spam mail.

This is so on point. Could not have said it better myself.

This looks enticing, but a few problems..

* No mention of Exchange support (not a biggie because Davmail exists, but still)

* No mention of proxy server support (got burned by this on Airmail and still can't use it to this day)

* No demo

* Nothing about a return policy

I really want to try this, but I'm not going to drop $10/$20 sight unseen, sorry.

Just because I'm curious, what do you mean by "proxy server support?" As far as I know SMTP/POP3/IMAP/etc doesn't readily support proxying natively.

Are you talking about proxy support for a native browser/HTML rendering engine?

Aren't these protocols supported by SOCKS proxies?

At least in the case of Airmail, it ignores the system HTTP/SOCKS proxy settings. SOCKS should work with anything, and HTTP for rendering message content.

Hey there, CEO here.

* Items 1 - 3: Stay tuned, we're looking in to these things.

* Item 4: If you buy it from our website and it doesn't work out, just email us, we'll refund you (support@mindsense.co).

I'm not trying to downplay your product, in fact I'm seriously considering davmail running on localhost to use it, but if you're at the "looking into" phase of supporting Exchange it's probably going to be a long way out. Most third party support that I've tried that isn't connecting to ActiveSync has been bug ridden. Different versions of exchange, different configurations, etc. I don't envy companies going down that path.

I came in here to say that pricing yourself at $10 (or even 20) is de-valuing yourself for a potential great product.

IMO the maker of this should charge $40+, which feels like the range that a good email client could easily be worth. We're all still suffering with terrible, bloated free email clients!

(Chuckled when I see one commenter was saying how expensive it is! I guess that's why I shy away from b2c sales).

I don't think Karunamon is complaining about how expensive it is. Just that you have no way of confirming whether it works with your email infrastructure beyond throwing $10 at it and crossing your fingers.

Pretty much this - the price is just a minor quibble. What it comes down to is what it's going to be compared against - the free apps we all know. Mail.app, Thunderbird, Evolution, sup, mutt, etc.

Do the extra features justify the workflow changes and the license price? Dunno. Have no way of knowing in this case :(

>which feels like the range that a good email client could easily be worth.

The problem is that I don't want to drop $40 sight unseen. I still haven't come across an email reader that doesn't suck, and $40, hell $10, is a lot of money to basically throw away if the program doesn't work out for what you need.

Yup. Not offering me a 15 day trial makes it super hard to know how it will work with my two email providers, not to mention the advertising video and site make it very hard for me to understand how using the app is like.

if you haven't tried it... mailmate is pretty great at being an extremely powerful email client with fast searching and power user features. not as pretty as this one and doesn't have some of the extra workflow enhancements that this has(like hiding automated emails, etc...) but it's worth the money.

edit: that's his site: http://freron.com/

Mailmate looks good but I have to confess I never gave it a shot due to it's design. Just looks so outdated.

I dunno… on Mavericks at least, I have to say it looks pretty good. The text-only buttons give it a nice minimalistic look. I have no idea how it looks on Yosemite though.

Yeah, if you are really into aesthetics, and they are a dealbreaker, it's probably not for you. not sure how much nicer it can look though as it's a standard email client really.

Try out the demo and see if it is for you.

The problem I had with MailMate was the lack of a threaded message view - that's now a total non-starter for me.

Leaving 'View → Organize by Thread ⇧⌘T' checked and switching to 'View → Layout → Thread Arcs ⌘3' isn’t what you’re looking for?

Shown here:

http://www.macdrifter.com/2013/11/mailmate-explorations.html

Since most mail programs I usually just try for a few days and move on from, I'm not really willing to drop $10 (I know that's almost nothing) on something just to try it out. Highly recommend adding a trial version.

Version one, while a nice client, had some serious bugs/missing features that eventually made it unusable for anything more than a light personal email client.

I'll give it another chance, also, props on making the upgrade free in the app store... mucho appreciated!

I noticed that. It's a nice surprise to see!

I tested this in their beta for Mac and am now back on Mail.app. After several updates, I continued to suffer from primarily two issues:

1. App would crash in the background and need to be reopened. 2. Emails that had been archived in Gmail still appeared as “incomplete” in Mail Pilot.

Perhaps the latter is product design and not a bug, but regardless, it was frustrating to say the least that emails I had hidden from view on Gmail were still visible in Mail Pilot.

I use Mail.app with Gmail and an elaborate set of filters/folders - Why should I use this product? - I consider Mail.app (and to an extent Thunderbird - or for that matter Alpine) adequate for my emailing needs - what feature do you have that I didn't know I needed but wont be able to live without?

Just bought it, got a window to enter a license code. In the email confirmation I dont see a clear field with a license code, also the field on the popup where I should activate a license does not allow copy/paste, thats crazy...They expect me to type in 40+ character license code...

I'm with schneems and my enthusiasm for mail clients has waned considerably since Sparrow.

Airmail 1/2, adequate but prone to many small usability issues that was very irksome.

Mailbox is very well designed, but key features like downloading attachments fails 50% of the time (and no option to change where they're downloaded to? Really?). I want it to succeed, but I feel like it should be much better by this point.

So, I'm willing to take the plunge. I bought Mail Pilot 2 (app store version). Here's my feedback:

- Options page is very cluttered. When deleting email there is mention of an option to turn off confirmation, but I couldn't find it.

- Client is very sluggish. To the point that, when writing mail, keystrokes take a second to register. This is a deal-breaker for me. This is on a brand new i7 MB Pro, 16GB of RAM.

- The design is very slick, but it's hard to determine if a message is unread or not. Feel like it should be more obvious. Also, all of the little icons (gravatars potentially?) don't fail gracefully displaying broken images instead.

This is after a few minutes of use, so there might be more that come up. I want to like it, I really do, but the sluggishness just kills it for me.

I've been using Mailbox for over a year now, I loved it a lot at the beginning, but since recent updates it become uglier and more unstable. I really got into an idea of inbox zero, but bugs and bad ui over time are really forcing me to try Pilot 2...

Definitely agree. The Mailbox team seems to be hard at work and is pushing updates almost on a daily basis to restore some of the design and improve stability. I don't mind switching mail clients but the workflow in Mailbox is hard to beat. Plus their native mobile client is best-in-class.

Can anyone explain the benefits of this product over other mail clients? The website is so full of fluff, I couldn't even understand what it was at first, let alone how it differed from other products in its category.

Did he / she / they ever fix the IMAP compatibility issues that arose in the first version?

The app was doing some funky stuff with IMAP Namespaces and wouldn't work with Fastmail's strict implementation, for example. There was a bit of a he-said she-said exchange on Twitter but I never saw a resolution.

For example;

https://mobile.twitter.com/mailpilotapp/status/4067773174577...

Total tangent, but in the future, you can just use "they" to mean "he/she/they". The singular, gender-neutral "they" is, contrary to the opinions of a rogue group of turn- of- the- last- century prescriptive grammarians, perfectly standard written English.

Stop! Abomination! Monstrosity! <g>

I tells you whats: you convince Jane Austen to revise and correct Pride and Prejudice, removing the singular "they", and I'll concede the point.

I'll make you a deal, Thomas: If you'll lobby equally vigorously for Jane's use of comma splices [1] [2] as acceptable practice, I'll reconsider the singular "they."

[1] E.g., the second comma in "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." (Chapter 1, first sentence.) Or the third [EDIT: fourth] comma in "Not all that Mrs. Bennet, however, with the assistance of her five daughters, could ask on the subject, was sufficient to draw from her husband any satisfactory description of Mr. Bingley." (Chapter 3, first sentence.) [3]

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma_splice

[3] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1342/1342-h/1342-h.htm#link2...

Those aren't comma splices because there aren't two independent clauses.

True -- is there a better term for the comma usage illustrated in the two Jane Austen quotes?

Superfluous, stylistic commas. Or superfluous stylistic commas if you prefer. Commas are inserted seemingly at random by some authors to control the pacing of a sentence. It's not necessarily wrong. btw, "confessions of a comma queen" in the new yorker may be an interesting read.

English teacher cosign. Though I do usually advise students to be aware of their audience, and avoid the singular "they" if it will distract pedantic readers. (Essentially, and unfortunately, you have to advance to the point in life where people are no longer searching for reasons to use a red pen.)

Is there a demo of Mail Pilot?

Decided to give it a try, and very impressed so far. Easy to set up, nice and clean interface. Most important of all, a fast workflow for processing email.

I encourage everyone to support high quality indy projects like this.

Minor point, there's a problem with the left margin on the main page (at least on an iPad)

Is there a way to import my current lists from mailbox app?

Would love to try this. No demo. Oh well.

And why there is no trial download?

Does Mail Pilot 2 support Markdown in the compose window? If so, I'll switch away from Airmail.

So I just bought a new Postbox license. Why should I buy and use your product instead? Convince me!

GPG support?

No, and no S/MIME either. I bought it, and just requested a refund.

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