Hacker News Reader

Comment by _alex_ | Hacker News Reader

That's gonna be devastating to the three people who use Mail.app

I switched to it with the first release of OS X and have been pretty happy with it.

Amazingly I have a handful of messages from the late 70s (a couple of jokes and a couple of personal messages from friends who passed away young) that have survived the file format transitions since then but I couldn't imagine could appear in something like google or yahoo mail. TBH I haven't made that many transitions: EMACS (BABYL) on ITS, then TOPS-20; Interlisp and Smalltalk clients to Grapevine back end; Lispm to TOPS-20 back end; GNU Emacs (rmail?) to IMAP; and then Apple Mail (macOS and iOS) -> IMAP. Emacs is the most powerful but these days still hard to put in your pocket.

In general a web browser seems like the worst interface to most services and activities as the UI can't be dedicated to the task at hand; instead you have system UI, Browser UI and only then the application UI. And a lot of mouse activity is expected.

That's not what the statistics say:

https://emailclientmarketshare.com

Wow, Mail.app has more market share than Outlook. I'm pleasantly surprised. Ditto for GMail only having ~30%.

Although,

> Since determining the client in which an email is opened requires images to be displayed, the data for some email clients and mobile devices might be over- or under-represented due to automatic image blocking.

Outlook doesn't display external images by default, while Mail.app does, so....

Also, I assume there's a different demographic that uses Mail vs Outlook. Those different demographics will receive different types of email, which may or may not be represented differently by companies who use Litmus tracking which is how this data is being collected.

As far as I know and recall from the years I've been using Mail.app, it does not download external images by default.

It does. I even provided a citation several weeks ago in another thread, though a quick Google search seems to bring up ample support of its own.

Like me you may have disabled it and forgotten. Whenever I get a new laptop at work I tend to go through and change all the defaults, such as reverting to plaintext composition, and habitually disable external image loading as part of the process.

The iPhone Mail app may have saner defaults, however, but I don't have an iPhone and have never used its e-mail client.

right, neither does Evolution or Thunderbird. It's crazy that Mail.app does this.

Does Apple excluded Mail.app from their privacy focused strategy?

I'm surprised how high the iPhone share is. Specifically in light of it usually being stated in any thread discussing apple and regulation that Apple do not have anything close to a controlling share of the market

Things may have changed, but to my knowledge iDevices have traditionally been disproportionately represented in many metrics due to getting heavier usage from their owners. Android wins by far in sheer units sold and in use, but iOS users use their devices so much more heavily and frequently that the average iOS user has a larger usage footprint than their Android counterpart.

Am I the only one using outlook and loving it?

Outlook on Mac consumes outrageous amounts of ram...

Absolutely. Mail.app on Windows instead is pretty lightweight /s

No - I still don't like it myself but they've made some pretty great strides in feature parity and have excellent integration if you're a Teams shop.

its gotten better but its still not great.

Yes

It’s my main email client, what’s wrong with it?

I tried it for a year for a Gmail-backed account. My complaints are:

1. Searches in Mail are slower and less accurate than web-client searches.

2. No access to Gmail filters. I don’t blame Mail for this, but it is a reason I returned to the web client.

3. Applying labels is harder in Mail. Maybe I missed it, but it wasn’t as easy to apply multiple labels or to apply a label to a draft email.

4. I couldn’t find a Send and Archive feature in Mail.

Basically, I like the Gmail experience. I hate Google, and I’d love to move away from them. I have for search, maps, mobile OS. For calendars, contacts, and mail, Google has the features I like.

Agree with your points. My use case doesn’t involve gmail so can see how that complicated things especially from a UX perspective. I wish IMAP/standards had more of a say in email like they did (sort of) for web.

I have an issue where it always thinks a couple of accounts are offline. I have to click the squiggle for it to download those accounts. Every restart I have to do the same thing.

That’s really annoying. I self host my email so haven’t seen something like that for a while. Last time I did it was I think related to some sort of contradiction between my port number selection and the encryption type for either the incoming or outgoing server but I can’t quite remember.

What’s right with it? I tried it a few times and always returned to web-based clients (on desktop) and third-party apps (outlook, gmail, protonmail) on iOS.

Web gmail sucks when you have multiple accounts.

So what's wrong with it?

I find it works very well, so basically everything seems right. Use it for nine accounts concurrently. Rarely have any issues.

What web-based client will allow you to read email without an Internet connection in Safari?

What marginal advantage does a third-party iOS client provide, that outweighs the risks of installing another app that is going to spy on me, have weaker integration with the OS and force me to relearn every new UI design language they come up with that in no way resembles the rest of the OS or its function and behavior?

>What web-based client will allow you to read email without an Internet connection in Safari?

I understand why it might be a deal breaker for you, but browsing email offline is not a use case everyone has.

> not a use case everyone has

That’s not what the original question was. It was:

> what’s right with [Mail for iOS]

So me implying that reading mail offline is one thing that’s right with it is not invalidated by the fact that it’s not a universally demanded feature (and yes, it has helped me many times, even recently).

Do you really need to remove that feature to build a “better” email client? What exactly is the tradeoff you see?

I want to downvote you because what you said sounds so absurd to me as an “old” (self identify at 40 thanks tech) person.

Thanks for saying this - it’s important to understand that the way things were are not alway the way things are :)

Your comment is about to become dead. I'll preserve the context here:

> That's gonna be devastating to the three people who use Mail.app

Multiply that by 100,000,000

The feature accretion and default layout redesigns have increasingly become a headache, but Mail.app still seems like the spiritual successor to Eudora, which may have remained the most popular desktop e-mail GUI if Microsoft hadn't leveraged their monopoly in the business workstation and LAN markets to push the adoption of Outlook. I use mutt for personal e-mail, but prefer Mail.app for work.

What are the options for those who foolishly installed an OS version later than Snow Leopard and can't run Eudora?

Porting the Mac version to a modern Mac OS will be a serious challenge, but source code is available (BSD-licensed). See https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-eudora-email-client-sou....

;_; one of us. one of us.

Whats a good alternative for macos these days? I loved sparrow back in the day, before I got acquired and killed by google.

I personally love Mimestream. Its a native Gmail client

Mailmate is pretty awesome

I am one of those three people. Do you know of any decent gui IMAP clients?

I like Mailmate

If I switch, it will need to be to something that works on more than just macOS, and nonfree software will be excluded from consideration.

Thunderbird?

https://www.thunderbird.net/

Thunderbird would be hot garbage even if it didn't constantly phone-home. I'd like an IMAP client that connects to my IMAP server and nothing else (connecting to outside web servers is okay if there are URLs in email and fetching remote resources is enabled).

A new Mac comes with something like 30 apps in the bar. I clicked and disabled every single one of them except Finder and used Safari to download another browser. If it was any other manufacturer, this mess would be quickly denounced by reviewers as crapware. But because it is by Apple, it is not a problem at all.

I am not expecting this to fix by itself. Maybe some major review blogs should first not parrot how magical the whole thing is and change the tone as such things are not only annoying, but also a security risk even if you don't actively use the app. I am not an expert on development for MacOS, but I would be surprised if there is no way to trigger the mail app from another app or a link. I just hope the bug is not exportable this way.

I'm not sure I could classify any of 23 items in the default dock as as crapware.

None are demos or trialware. Hell, I use all of them except for FaceTime, Podcasts, Pages, TV and Launchpad.

I do remove most of them from the dock since I use spotlight to launch things, but removing System Preferences from my dock hardly makes it crapware.

They lure you into using services you wouldn't use otherwise. I don't see how having FaceTime or TV is any different than when Google was bundling Google+ in Android.

I assume you mean the Dock? I am with you there, on a new install of macOS I drag pretty much all their apps out of it (to be fair, I do the same thing on a new Ubuntu desktop install too...). Of course in a sense the Dock is an anachronism, I find it useful once in the while to drag a file onto an app there, but generally for launching apps I prefer Spotlight (actually Alfred).

Yes. The term dock came out of my mind, thanks. And yes, I emptied the dock. But obviously taking stuff off the dock is the minor inconvenience, but the idea that all this was preinstalled. Package managers and app stores should be where almost all of this belongs.

With the Mail.app pegging their CPU to 100%, those three people are unlikely to notice. Frankly, it's unlikely for the attacker to be able to do anything either, aside from force-terminating Mail.app.

(Disclaimer: I want to like Mail.app, but I don't need another fan in my office.)

The post indicated that the attacker can change the configuration, filters, as well as forwarding rules (exfil), this doesn’t seem terribly benign.

I'm using Mail.app since 2007 when i switched to Mac and never had issues other than a couple of times around 2009-10 when it had sync problems with Gmail. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Try taking a sample; it’ll tell you what Mail is doing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com