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Comment by wilbertliu | Hacker News Reader

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'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.

I've got about 80k messages total across two mail accounts, and it works fine. Scrolling through it takes time, but everything else is fine. Searching, filtering, sorting and switching mailboxes are not instantaneous, but reasonably fast. Certainly not unwieldy.

mail works fine for me with a large inbox (GMAIL).

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?

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).

If you are using Gmail/G-Suite I would check out either https://mailplaneapp.com/ or https://www.kiwiforgmail.com/. Both are decent native Mac app wrappers for the Gmail/G-Suite web client.

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.

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