I don’t know if I’m an odd user but I find that I like the stock Mail app. It’s simple. Wondering what you all might be using other than Mail as I’d like to try something else with a few more features. So far I’ve tried a few of the main stream ones that try to wipe your butt for you and nothing has really struck me as worth changing to.
Before you ask I’m not sure what features I’m looking for haha 
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I use the stock mail app, never had a use for anything else
I use Kiwi for Gmail. It gives me the look of Gmail with some added features.
I’ll give it a try thanks
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This might make a good Hands-On-Mac. After trying many apps I’ve settled on Mailmate. It’s not elegant or pretty - it’s an old-school email tool, and a powerful one at that.
I particularly like its support for GPG/SMIME signing and encryption and strong support for text email. It doesn’t support templates as fully as the open-source Claws-Mail, alas. I use Claws on Linux and Windows, but it’s not well-suited to the Mac.
A big key to email handling, for me, is using a good IMAP server (in my case, Fastmail) and handling most filtering server-side. That way everything is the same on every system I use. I spent a lot of time tuning my IMAP folder structure and filtering to work for me. That’s time well spent.
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Thanks Leo I’ll give it a try. I also agree, that would be an interesting HOM
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I use the stock mail app. It works well enough. Would love a HoM on mail mate though
I do agree with @Leo that having mail filters run serverside is very useful.
I actually like gmail’s handling of IMAP, though it does have some quirks, this might be because I have spent a lot of time figuring out the quirks and making them work for me… or because I am a little odd. Either way it works well for me.
I’ve been using spark mail. The built in mail app has been crashing on me when I try to delete the trash folder so I stopped using it. Spark mail runs well on my Mid 2009 Macbook Pro.
LOVED the mail.app in macOS pre-Catalina. Use the old-fashioned column view, which Catalina “deprecated” (meaning ruined and removed) so stuck with Mojave. Big Slur’s mail.app is joy again with column view. BUT… sticking with Mojave until SuperDuper! is able to backup Big Sur. Apple seems to be doing everything possible to prevent bootable backups. Learned the hard way early on that an image is mission-critical (for me) so I can fix OS when I do something stupid. Mac mini (late 2014) with 1TB SDD external drive.
@Bart, if SuperDuper! is holding you back, take a look at Carbon Copy Cloner. It supports Big Sur with a work-around to create bootable backup.
Many thanks. I’ll check it out now.
Any ideas on the best mail client on mac for gmail? I have always used the browser but looking to more away from that.
I use Thunderbird, but you could check out Kiwimail.
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I’ve tried them all but settled on Mailmate. It’s very old school but has a bunch of features I use, including
- PGP/SMIME support
- Very powerful automated templates for new messages and replies
- Excellent search
- A rich set of plug-ins, including 3rd party
- Excellent IMAP support
I use it with Fastmail, but it works with Gmail’s pseudo-IMAP. Mailmate is in active development by its single developer. No M1 support yet.
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It’s Mailmate free to use or is there a charge?
Mailmate has a free trial but it’s a one-time purchase of $50.
Some day I’ll write a post about why, given how important email is, you really should be willing to pay for both the service (Fastmail) and a good client (Mailmate).
I suppose the same is true for messaging clients.
Lately I’ve been enamoured of Delta Chat, an end-to-end encrypted messaging client that uses your email server as the backend.
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Thank you Leo. You’ve been incredibly helpful
Again I love Mailspring for Mac. I like the look of the new outlook on Mac but it doesn’t currently support aliases which is a big thing for me since I pay for a Google Workspace account and have several emails I use that all belong to the same inbox.
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