Ask HN: Best email client for a Mac?

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.

$50!?

It gets quite slow with large mailboxes.

And it’s freaking fast. After trying out other mail clients, Mail app is the fastest in term of new mail sync speed.

Not something that is wrong per se, but I moved away from the Mail.app because I switched to Inbox a few years ago because of it's productivity features. The way Inbox handled 'snoozing' mails (mails returing from snooze would appear at the top of the inbox) is not supported by Mail.app (or any other standard mail app for that matter, even Gmail at the time). So I switched to Inbox web app on the desktop as well.

I believe there are some plugins that support similar features, but I have not yet found a Mail.app snoozing that is portable as well (eg: Android/webapp support).

I might be a "Gmail is weird" issue but I've always had trouble going through my inbox and deleting a lot of email one by one. They disappear, then they come back and then disappear again. Hitting undo after deleting something by mistake is also a recipe for disaster for email that kind of disappears but still shows up in search.

It can also be pretty laggy (e.g. selecting multiple messages), but this has gotten a lot better in High Sierra.

I still use it though since I have yet to find an alternative that I prefer (I've only tried a few though)

I just tried switching to it, but one instant problem is that you can't tie signatures to aliases, you can only tie them to accounts. So for example, I have a number of different email aliases that I switch between, but while Mail _does_ choose the correct alias depending on who the incoming email has been addressed to, you can't attach a signature to that alias - you have to manually choose the signature every time

Last time I used it with Gmail accounts, it doesn't show phishing warnings like Gmail proper does. For friends and family, I really want them to get flagged of anything suspicious - or even ideally an option to just not deliver anything suspicious.

FYI: Spark stores your credentials in their cloud unlike your typical email client which stores them locally.

https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/5grsan/do_not_use_...

+1 for Spark. I know there are other clients that have snooze and ‘send later’ functions, but I’ve been using Spark for a couple of years and haven’t really had any complaints.

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

Another Spark user here. Works great. I'm also using the iOS version.

Spark works great for me too!

Mutt is great if you're not often dealing with images or rich text, and if you love keyboard-based workflows. I was a mutt guy for a while. But I've found apps like MailMate or even GMail's web client to be keyboardy enough, without some of the compromises and pain points (e.g. fighting OfflineIMAP)

Not sure why this is being downvoted. It works for a lot of people I know, is modular, stable, open-source and works across the Unixen.

The obvious tradeoff the relative lack of polish and overhead during initial setup, but if you're willing to put up with that it's a fine 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.

are you using mutt's built-in imap functionality, or something like offlineimap?

I also use Mutt.

I've liked Airmail, but it has a tendency towards weird bugs (e.g. adding gibberish attachments to email chains in large numbers). Email tools, imho, need to be 'boring', stable, and predictable, and Airmail never has been, any of the times I've tried to use it.

Does that store mail on their servers at all? It's becoming increasingly confusing as to which of these new mail clients require a 3rd party server for them to do their "magic" on.

I have to dissent unfortunately, I find it slow, buggy, unwieldy, and it will frequently do crazy things to HTML formatted emails.

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

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

I wanted to use this, but i couldn't get any answer from the developers if the App stores my e-mail credentials on their cloudservice. There was a review on app store where the user had their account overtaken in connection with installing the app.

How does it feel holding on to a relic? :D

In a more serious note, are you actually using eudora? If so I'd love to hear if there is a still-maintained version as well as the reasons sticking to it.

I used to love Postbox until the latest 6th version.

Sure, they've - allegedly - made it run faster but they've also removed extension support, blocked any ways to hack in a calendar (which could previously be done by adding a permanent browser tab pointing to Google Calendar) and seriously hurt legibility with its new design by removing dividing lines, decreasing contrast across the board and giving all the icons a bright random colour.

A real shame as there are no real alternatives.

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.