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But now I took the leap and spent the $10 and I'm loving every second of it, especially the amazing integration with gmail shortcuts. Pretty much every shortcut works instantly and reliability, without the lag and wonkiness of the web interface.
After turning on gmail shortcuts, I've found it to be one of the most keyboard friendly apps I've ever used. And the beautiful UI is still there animating all your actions. Makes me feel like an email ninja.
sending while disconnected results in message being saved as a draft locally.
and there's this really cool activity window that shows exactly what it's doing: http://d.pr/CSVm
Apple Mail was also, in my experience, really flaky. Sparrow has been pretty darn solid since a couple of betas ago.
You can see both sides of the conversation, and I prefer how a conversation is treated as a single entity. If I archive a conversation, all messages in that conversation are archived. And if a new reply to the conversation comes in, the entire conversation gets pushed back to my inbox.
i would love to know what does that.
I just can't use it yet because in the list view the sender is emphasized more than the subject. That's completely backwards for me as I rarely get emails with the same subject but I get a lot of mail from the same small group of people. This causes me to just stare at the inbox without having a good overview of what I'm looking at. Here's my feedback idea if anyone wants to help push this forward:
http://getsatisfaction.com/sparrow/topics/emphasize_subject_...
But I tried Sparrow when it was in beta a while ago. Perhaps I should give it a shot agian.
The new Postbox release is pretty solid and does almost everything I want.
It just saddens me that it's basically the future now and we still can't seem to get email clients that don't suck. Some are better than others, sure, but they all seem to suck in some fundamental way. FWIW, in Postbox it seems to be speed.
That's because Postbox is based on Thunderbird, which is not a path to creating a fast, lightweight mail app.
I can only think of a handful of desktop mail engines for the Mac (Mail.app, Thunderbird + children, Entourage, Sparrow). If mail clients suck, it's because more people need to write one.
Eudora was amazing.
Because of that, I assume that they've removed the Ads from the paid version.
If you've ever lost access to Google, you'll never rely only on webmail again. There is absolutely no way to get in touch with a responsive human there. You may mysteriously get access back after a few weeks. Or maybe not. In the meantime, their online "help forms" will direct you to other forms, none of which provide any indication about what to do in cases when Google has erred.
There is literally no recourse.
Maybe it's because I don't have an email problem - I don't know, but it seems like more buzz than substance, at least to me.
Edit: I have no qualms with this product, and I'll probably buy it just to see what the hype is about. I'm mostly just surprised that it reached #1.
Gmail is online only, though yes, it's very good. I need offline, and I have 7 active accounts; Gmail online isn't a complete solution by any means.
Apple Mail has poor / nonexisting IMAP subscription, and few power-user tools, though it's my favorite desktop client so far. Fast with thousands of emails and 7 accounts, accurate searches across tons of data, integration with OSX's Address Book, and the worst plugin API in existence: existing, but entirely undocumented.
Thunderbird is a load of crap. I really, truly want to like it, but it always leaves a bitter taste, despite being one of the better clients overall. It continually chews on nothing until I kill it, preventing any updates to the account it's spinning on. It slows to a crawl on a mere few-thousand emails. Is far slower to retrieve and display data than Mail (easily 5x slower in the best case). Hinges privacy / security decisions on the wrong data (I had spam recently with a display "from" of "Apple.com" - Thunderbird decided it was actually from Apple, and displayed all the images, despite coming from another source and being in my spam box). Doesn't integrate with OSX's address book, and its existing address book is simply a joke, an insult to their users.
Mutt / Sup I intend to look into more fully, but have a high learning curve (the Vims of email clients), and I want / need HTML email and don't recall if they handle such things well.
What other free ones would you suggest I try? I need OSX and Windows software, I'd love efficient tagging support, and intend to move to certificates for signatures / encryption (and every system I've encountered is beyond an inflexible-PITA for certificates, almost all the way to totally ineffective).
http://getsatisfaction.com/sparrow/topics/gmail_priority_inb...
I love the increased signal-to-noise that Priority Inbox provides, and I'd miss it in a client that just shows my regular inbox.
EDIT: Got a priority email after posting this. It didn't appear in the 'Priority' label window. womp womp.
Having an easy way to get to the Priority Inbox is the only thing holding me back from using it regularly. Right now I'm sticking with Mailplane.
I did switch back to Postbox after my first try with Sparrow, but I was sold when they added command-enter to send and the ability to remove the app icon from the dock. I wish Tweetie allowed menubar-only mode like that.
still, it is very solid as _just_ an email client for gmail, and only $10.
* set GV to forward txts to GM, replying to the email will reply to the txt
* have transcribed voicemails emailed to you with a link to play the original in the email
* use the "Call phone" button under chat to make outgoing calls via the web for free (for now)
I think that's what he meant, at least. Only one of those things (the last) isn't available outside of Gmail itself.
I didn't know there was a paid version -- I'm using the free version with ads disabled. I'll glady pay up.
In a way, though, they just hacked the "debut at one price, then cut for a spike" model: They simply floated the idea of debuting at price A, and launched at price B. Which is pretty ingenious, as it essentially has the same Groupon-esque value psychology of the original model, but doesn't have the inverse effect on early adopters. Everyone's happy.
The number one thing I look for in a mail program is threading. Then good filtering and usability.
* search: the built-in one takes ages compared to remote search. I understand that it makes the search behaviour the same both locally and remotely, but its still a hassle to have really slow search locally. * labels with archived items aren't shown in the sidebar. I'd like a reminder that there's unread mail in the mailinglists.
Other than that, it looks great!
I did like the simple feel of it though and would be willing to buy it for anything less than $14 NZD.
No search box?
It's buried in the menus though.
Some elements depend on the size of your window, which, frankly, I like. I remarked on this because others have found the search not to be where they expect.
The sparrow UI only shows one label in it's main list view, and then only the colour of said label. If you use labels to assist in scanning your inbox, then multiple labels on messages in your inbox increases their usefulness considerably.
In it's current state Sparrow obfuscates what i consider to be gmail's most valuable feature.