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Comment by ggregoire | Hacker News Reader

Why do people use Mail? (genuine question)

It's very fast (native app), it supports practically every type of mail account ever, everything can be stored locally (great for offline batch processing of emails), and there are keyboard shortcuts for everything. It takes a bit of customization to get a layout that works nicely for my workflow (I use the classic layout).

There are a bunch of other 'efficient' mail apps, but if you just need basic features and don't go for some exotic or trendy workflow, Mail works fine.

I don't upgrade to the latest OS for at least a few weeks, though, because if something like this is systemic, it will be fixed in the .1 or .2 release.

Also, always keep at least one local backup (I have Time Machine for that), and at least one remote backup.

It’s also so much better for working with massive amounts of mail compared to Gmail and other webmails. In Mail I can work through many tens or hundreds of messages quickly and easily. With Gmail I often feel like I’m jumping through hoops to do the same thing.

A use Mail.app but to be fair. Search in mail.google.com is much faster than in Mail.app (when you have thousands of mails)

I’ve never figured out how to force Apple Mail to download ALL attachments. How do I do this? In my experience it never downloads ALL of them and when you’re offline and click on a very old message it will not have the attachment unless you go online.

You can set this preference by going to the Mail menu > Preferences > Accounts. Select the account you want to adjust on the left, and in the first "Account Information" tab, there should be a pop-up for Download Attachments: [All, Recent, None]. The default for newly added accounts is "Recent".

The preference doesn’t actually do what it says, as mentioned in the original post. Starting with macOS 10.12, it doesn’t always download all the attachments, and even ones that did download (because you viewed the message) may get purged later.

Like the other comment says, this does not work, unfortunately. It’s supposed to work but it does not, and I’ve easily verified this.

I don't know if it's still true, but until about Snow Leopard I could have a smooth keyboard driven experience that completely aligned with other apps such as NetNewsWire.

It has a simple and pleasant native (non-web) interface that works consistently across devices and comes with the OS. It doesn't have many features, but all I want is to send, receive and organize e-mail in folders. I don't need a splash/welcome screen, extensions or built-in calendar/reminders. Honestly, I wish more apps were like this.

> Honestly, I wish more apps were like this.

It's really hard to find apps like that, and I often feel like it's getting harder as time goes on.

The best feature is (for me anyway) it's fast and works consistently across all my devices. I've yet to have a reason to move to anything else.

If I was someone continually running into issues as some seem to continually have happen I might not feel that way, but I've been on the Catalina and iOS 13 betas and thankfully even with the betas didn't have issues.

EDIT: I did have earlier versions of the iOS betas duplicate draft messages. Which lead to confusion and double sending since at first glance it looked like like I hadn't sent a message in drafts; once I figured out what was going on I would just check my sent to make sure I sent it before deleting the dupe in drafts. At least it wasn't a data loss bug.

It's built-in, fast, and works for what I need. Which is mostly skimming newsletters and then deleting them.

When I need a more featured alternative to something I'll use one (Things instead of Reminders, OneNote instead of Notes, VLC instead of QuickTime, etc) but email hasn't been one of those things.

Is there a reason that I should be looking at Mail alternatives? What important features is it lacking?

1. It comes in the box.

2. It allows me to have 7 inboxes routed to one view

3. It's pretty fast.

4. While "boring", It usually" just works.

Looks decent, doesn't hog obscene amounts of memory (for me - I know others have different experiences, and this can vary based on more factors than worth explaining).

I also just use macOS/iOS Mail because FastMail can push notify to the clients, and FastMail's iOS app isn't ideal.

It’s built in, and it’s always worked fine. What do you recommend instead?

I’m not opposed to switching but everything looks pretty lousy, in terms of workflow and integration, and if I have to live with “pretty lousy”, then “zero cost” and “mainstream first-party offering” seem to be the way to go.

I've used Mail.app since my NeXT days, and besides familiarity it has the simplest UX that could possibly work (if it was actually implemented properly).

I have Thunderbird installed for accessing a large e-mail archive on my NAS (simply because it has more control over local copies of messages) and find it horribly clunky and un-Mac-like even today.

And none of the trendy, flashy "new inbox philosophy" apps that have come and gone over the years were any sort of an improvement.

Even though I work at Microsoft today and acknowledge that the Entourage dumpster fire was finally fixed in the modern versions of Outlook for the Mac, I still prefer Mail.app because of its simplicity and straightforwardness, and refuse to use anything else for my personal e-mail.

Which is why I won't be upgrading to Catalina until this data loss bug is fixed...

It’s the built-in email client.

And there’s nothing particularly wrong or bad about it (until now, maybe).

because it is a mail "app" and not a mail "service" that has access to my emails and sells my data.

Our CRM works only with Mail.app and we cannot use G-Suite Mail directly. (Gmail support is a longtime issue with Mail.app, Apple still does not use the API …)

You can get message: URLs using AppleScript which will open the mail. I paste these in my Orgmode files. This allows me to archive the mail (and keep my inbox clean) while still keeping track of tasks.

Native and I like it's rules better than Thunderbird.

What alternatives do you like?

what do you use? (genuine question)

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