Mail Pilot – The State of Email on the Mac
blog.schneidmaster.com
blog.schneidmaster.com
Compared to what? Since, you know, it can run most apps other platforms can (and most people use), from mutt to Thunderbird and Outlook.
>For all of Apple's skill in crafting beautiful hardware (and as much as I like OSX as an operating system), Mail.app is outdated and still has limited support for Gmail labels
Labels? Why should it support a proprietary technology -- and much more from a competitor, and much more one that might kill IMAP at any time?
Labels aside, I never had much problems with Mail.app. And, spam aside, I get around 200 mails per day.
Because 90% of tech nerds are fucking obsessed with google and think everything that comes from them should be immediately adopted by the entire industry.
As I've said before - IMAP has a spec for "keywords". People always piss and moan about it not being supported by mail clients, and conveniently forget that Google's labels weren't supported either, when it was introduced - and yet some clients have added supported for it.
What are the chances that a) more competing email providers and b) more mail clients would support IMAP keywords today, if Google had used the existing standard instead of inventing their "labels" system?
That's just because IMAP has a spec for everything.
That's the huge problem with IMAP: it can do too much and it's one of the more complicated "classic" protocols (from the area where RFCs were much more concise and bare-bones).
There are so many implementation bugs in various clients and servers that IMAP feels like being kept together by duct tape.
As such, people are very reluctant to add more protocol features to their implementations and even if they did, with some likelihood, the feature would only work in very specific client/server combinations.
In case of labels, the incentive for Google was to produce the implementation that works best with the existing clients (use pretend-folders for labels), and the incentive for client is to implement labels the google way (the only widely-deployed server that currently supports them)
Email is such a mess.
I doubt that very much. If Google could turn off IMAP tomorrow and not lose a huge chunk of their clients, they would.
IMAP does much because we have many needs. And HTML does even more, but we still have several top notch browsers competing.
In any case, if IMAP development is so difficult, have people join ONE IMAP library project that tries to be as complete as it can, instead of each mailer creating its own IMAP client libs.
Like we have Webkit/Blink which is used across multiple browsers.
It wasn't really a comparative claim. Email also sucks on most other platforms. The possible exception is iOS- the iOS7 Mail.app, Mailbox, and Mail Pilot are all actually good (rather than least bad) options.
Having tinkered around with other mail clients for the Mac, I'm starting to believe that something in the vein of mu4e[1] holds the only truly brighter future for me, but it will be such a radical break after years with Mail.app that I'm hesitant to take the plunge. On the other hand, I am "living" in multi-term[2] now rather than iTerm2, so it probably won't be all that jarring to emacs-ify another element of my daily computing experience.
Plus, I can use Markdown-Here[2] to compose my emails in Markdown.
That aside, it handled those 500k emails way better than e.g. Mail.app (whose performance routinely falls off a cliff somewhere back between 200k and 300k), synced quickly, etc and all without the normal annoyances that keep me away from Thunderbird. A very solid, cheap option.
That said, the re-indexing eventually got annoying enough that I disabled a bunch of IMAP folders in Gmail and switched back to Mail.app. I'd love to find a real alternative, but everything else I've touched has been awful in absolutely-critical ways (usually one or more of: can't handle a couple hundred thousand emails at all, can't display HTML emails, can't stand the UI, or useless/nonexistent filtering tools).
Does not seem to have stopped other companies, from the Omni Group to Pixelmator. And didn't iA sold hundends of thousands of copies of it's editor when other editors where 1/5 to 1/10 the price? If it solves a need, people will pay for quality.
Not to mention that today's $10 correspond to 10 to 30 times more people using Macs than the times of $50-$100 email clients did.
The reviews of both apps don't contain complaints about price — unless the app is not working for the customer, which is a pretty reasonable complaint.
Although I have never sold software at a higher price in the past, so I have nothing to compare with.
It sounds like you're an indie dev. You probably could charge more than $1.50/minute for your time ... so if you spend even five minutes supporting a customer, you're wiped out all your revenue (not even counting development time!).
I don't know. Some people still value quality and attention to detail. On my Android devices I'm using MailDroid pro, which is priced at around $20. And that's for a mobile app. But it's good enough for me to think that's worth it.
I'm paying $40 a year for Plex, and $180 for Spotify. I think that's good value too. I pay gladly.
Obviously there will be "cheapskates" always going for the cheapest option, but those people have always existed. Now they just have more & cheaper options and there's no way for a developer to escape that.
I guess they'll have to price that (smaller premium market) into the premium-price and hope it wont make it even smaller.
Since then I've come around considering lifetime subscription, but now they've upped the price for it a little more. And right now I have enough other things sucking up my funds.
In a perfect illustration of human irrationality, I will probably get around to it later.
[restarting] 10 times a day = it has a bug that needs restrarting 10 times a day to do so.
He didn't say it was perfect as in bug free. Just as in "does what I want".
Unfortunately, Apple began syncing Smart Mailboxes via iCloud in Mavericks, and the Smart Mailboxes saved on iCloud became corrupt. This corruption causes Mail.app to crash on launch when it tries to fetch and apply remote settings, and affects every computer that uses iCloud.
Senior support at Apple confirmed it's an iCloud issue and passed it to support engineering to resolve, which have been MIA. Issue remains open after 2 months, during which I've tried every alternative desktop email client and found them severely lacking - some are highly functional, some have pretty graphics and typography, none both. (to tie this back to the original article, I ran the Mail Pilot preview a couple months ago)
Heed my warning - iCloud will wreck the things you hold dear.
/rant.
http://www.mailpilot.co/bestuseguide.html
The repetitive "Finding messages outside of Mail Pilot" sections make me think that it's not going to play well with other clients -- unless it means that it's storing some sort of metadata/copies in those other places, which is not the impression I get (it seems to be saying it will actually make a bunch of folders and move your mail into them, which is Not OK).
Seeing workflow wrapped into an email client strikes me as wrong—I want my mail client to be for communication, not for managing my next actions.
I liked Unibox more. It has a way of minimising the complexity of my inboxes. Being able to see all the attachments to and from a particular person is very nice.
Mail Pilot feels a little less polished and less smooth. It also makes a very strong effort to educate me (popups and explanations are attached to everything, intro tutorials and videos) but I still found it a little confusing to navigate. Initially the "New Message" button simply did not work until I restarted the app.
Unibox did not make much effort to teach me. And despite completely rethinking my inbox I've found it straightforward to use. Unibox seems to place the information you are looking for right where you expect it (for example, dates fade in and attach to the scrollbar as you swipe through your emails, changing as you scroll). It's very cleverly designed to show and hide information as you navigate, without showing too much.
If you don't mind switching to a people-centric interface, I'd recommend Unibox. Mail Pilot seems aimed more at people who like to organise their email (the reminders system, completion checks, sorting). I just like to read my email and write, and Unibox does a great job of it.
If you like the interface and concept, I would definitely recommend Unibox over Mail Pilot- it's more polished in general. But it's a very opinionated mail client and I really couldn't get over its opinions.
Though I do sort junk from social sites into their own folder and filter them out of those smart mailboxes.
No other mail client supports smart folders. They all want me to make a bazillion folders and a bazilljon rules to support them. It all seems so primitive.
I tried it both with a GMail and a classical IMAP accounts. Both were a total disaster. Two years of development for THAT?!
Dates were messed up. Some mails would never appear, some would, but with another sender! Gmail labels were not properly managed, Lists cannot be deleted, even when emptied. And those new MailPilot.* folders are just plain wrong, it breaks your flow in ANY other mail client.
What a waste of time.
This prompted me to finally just break down and spend the $2 on AirMail. What surprises am I in for, both good and bad?
Bad: Still get bugs and crashes that I'd expect from a beta, not a production-ready app.
One exchange oddity, the contact lookup only appears to work from a "Global address book" drop down under Window.
I guess I'll give it a shot with gmail in the meantime.