Hacker News Reader

Comment by berkut | Hacker News Reader

IMO their iOS app would be great if it had offline support - it doesn't...

Do they have this feature that if you have catch-all enabled and you had just used a random email on some website random-email-addr-smjgg@your-domain.tld and you receive email sent to that address and when you reply it automatically starts the reply from random-email-addr-smjgg@ and not from some preset-alias@?

Because on Mail.app (iOS/Mac) if you want to reply from that random-email-addr-smjgg@ you have to first add that in "Email Address" for that account in Settings. I am trying to find an app that does it (my mail provider is not fastmail, it's mailbox).

This is the primary reason I use the fastmail app instead of mail.app, because it uses the incoming email address as the reply address.

I don't think this feature is present in any third party mail app (and frankly mailbox is not going to release an app with this feature) and honestly that would be weird to manage as in how do you know gmail.com is not the user's own domain but some-other.tld is. But Fastmail does know this as their app is not a common third party app.

Lack of this feature makes full use of catch-all very unintuitive.

On mac, that feature is actually available in MailMate, which remains the best in class email client I’m aware of. It’s the only one with that feature though.

This features (to reply using the alias the email was sent to) was available on AquaMail Android (not free) years ago, though you had to configure it which was painful if you changed phones a lot.

Thunderbird can do this with some configuration for replying to emails - set the pattern of the "Reply from this identity when delivery headers match" value of Account Settings. It's not as good as the addon Virtual Identity used to be, but it works for me 85% of the time (see https://github.com/absorb-it/Virtual-Identity/issues/22#issu...).

For new messages you still need an extension like Identity Chooser or to manually edit the from header before sending.

Their Android app also doesn't have offline support, which makes me sad. Email is a great fit for offline first, and it's always frustrating to see a notification and tap it to get a loading screen.

This is the #1 reason why I'm going to switch away from Fastmail when my current billing cycle ends. The #2 reason is that they're Australian.

Otherwise I've been super happy with them.

What are you switching to?

Not sure yet. ProtonMail doesn't work offline either and is apparently not straightforward to use with other clients. I wish it were sensible to host your own email, but I've heard that's a horrible misadventure.

ProtonMail iOS app works offline, at least you can read email and draft email offline. The client is also open source but they don’t seen overly keen on accepting contributions.

Ah, I didn't check iOS - I would use an Android client.

Aren’t their servers all in the US?

Doesn't matter. Under Australian law they can still be compelled to install backdoors.

I wouldn't switch mail providers over this... There are other email clients out there (although, it's sort of nice to use a first party one), and IMAP (or JMAP) should work fine for offline.

I would probably not switch if it were only issue #1 or issue #2, but with both it has me shopping. I might fail to find a better alternative, of course, but I haven't given up yet.

A different client is definitely the fallback, though I haven't found a great one of those either. Granted it's been ~6 years since I last searched.

Open to suggestions!

I like K-9.

https://k9mail.app/

Ya know, I never thought of it before now, but you’re right. I just want to read an email that I’ve already received!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com