Postbox appears to be IMAP only.
It supports POP3 as well. But, as this thread is entitled “Mac clients for Gmail”, Postbox is really very good for that and I think worth the 30 day trial. I did use it December (I had used it long ago but had performance issues with the Mac I was using; that’s no longer an issue for my middle of the road 2016 MacBook Air with 8 GB RAM), and I think it’s very good. I still may switch to it. It handles Gmail very well, can be configure to use Gmail web keyboard shortcuts (including the “gl” to switch to another label and just “l” to set a label for a message), and is very stable.
I love the look and layout of Mail on Big Sur, but there is one thing that I miss: in Mail up through Catalina, there were collective mailboxes for all the junk, send, trash, and archive folders for all of the mail accounts you had configured. Unless I am missing something, there is no more collective junk and archive folders in Big Sur. You can create Smart Folders to try to replicate this, but they are pretty slow to refresh. Postbox also doesn’t have these collected folders, but the Smart Folders do seem to be more responsive, and there are a lot more single keystroke shortcuts compared with Mail.
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I finally discovered the solution to this: In the Mail app, hover the mouse pointer on the “Favorites” line at the top of the sidebar, and a “+” icon will appear to the right. Click that and you can select “All junk” and “All archive” to add to the list of favorite folders.
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I basically like Mail in Big Sur, but for the life of me can’t get searching for mails to work well. I spend some time trying to simply find some emails that I sent to a certain user with nothing coming up, so I went over to gmail.com and entered to:the address and they immediately popped up.
Search is still the big down point for me in regular Mail.
doug
Does InfoClick still work in Big Sur?
Diane
Absolutely LOVE InfoClick. It is invaluable to me as I often have to locate e-mails from years ago. An excellent product from an excellent company.
I am really struggling with going to Big Sur given all I’ve read on TidBits Talk. Especially concerned about the small, light fonts that Apple seems to love so much - and those of us with bad eyesight have struggled with for years. And the CCC issues also concern me. I’m so glad I got my iMac 27’ in 2019 - I think it has saved me some unneeded headaches. No InfoClick will just be one more nail on Apple for me, and I have been with Apple since around 1985 - wrote my doctoral thesis on an Apple ||C. I know, more than you needed to know :-/
I go to System Preferences > Accessibility > Display and check Increase Contrast. This help a lot and has been available for several versions of macOS.
In Big Sur Mail Preferences > Fonts & Colors, I set the font sizes to make the message list easier to read. I bump the displayed message text as required using ⌘-+.
In Finder I set the font size using View > Show View Options, as well as the icon size.
I find no differences in visual usability as compared to Catalina or Mojave where I used a similar approach.
There are various stupidities in the Big Sur UI, but fonts are the least of them.
Back in Mailstream today after the developer created a new release that lets you see the full address when composing and prioritize the most recently used address (I had been making mistakes and sending to old addresses, etc.).
By the way, standard Mail’s shortcut for sending CMD+= is really flaky. Sometimes it works, mostly it doesn’t. It’s a relief to get back to where a simple shortcut for sending works. Plus having multiple labels is very convenient in the Gmail world.
I still need to use standard Mail, though, when it comes to image handling and annotation. I hope Neil adds support for that as well.
doug
I’ve been using simultaneously Mimestream and Spark for different gmail accounts for over a year. Each has its quirks and nice features. However, there is a feature that both lack: deleting file attachments. As even Gmail web interface does not allow it, I rely on Thunderbird to remove attachments, and just for that. I don’t use Thunderbird regularly as I find its interface counterintuitive and it reduces my productivity.
At least through Sierra (I don’t have Mail installed on anything more recent), cmd= increases font size, as it does in Safari (through Catalina) and anywhere else that font size is allowed to increase. I know the menu calls it cmd+ (when it’s in the menu, it isn’t always), but I’ve never actually needed to include the shift, even on pristine installs. If cmd= or other near-system wide keyboard shortcut was reassigned to something else, I’d expect odd results at best.
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Thank you James for your suggestions. I have used all of those. They help somewhat (contrast already set to near max in Catalina, Finder view size set to max, 16), also, because I have a iMac 27" 5K Retina I also use System Preferences>Display>Scaled setting that to the 2nd size choice. That has made a great deal of difference. Unfortunately I have some visual conditions that are a bit worse of late because of the COVID isolation - can’t wait to get back to my Duke eye specialist in hopes of stopping what has been happening.
Very much appreciate your suggestions. Especially like your “There are various stupidities in the Big Sur UI, but fonts are the least of them.” LOL And appreciate your affirming there are ways to get around it.
Note that in the latest Mimestream 0.18 the developer added image annotation - and it’s quite good! It seems to be like image notation in the Mail app itself. That now beats out most email clients on the Mac.
I hope he adds image size (small, medium, large, actual) soon as well and an indicator of how large your email is.
Neil (the developer) is quite responsive to requests. I keep on using Mimestream until I run into a problem. Then I usually switch back to Mail for a while. Then when there is another upgrade I switch back to Mimestream.
I do like the labeling in Mimestream (i.e. multiple labels per email thread allowed, like in Gmail). It’s really coming along quite well. You might want to give it a try if your email accounts are all or mostly Gmail. I also use regular Mail for my non-Gmail accounts.
Yes, I use Postbox. When I finally left PowerMail about 6 years ago because they got hopelessly mired in their “text preferred” model, I dabbled with Apple Mail for a hot minute and then migrated to Postbox.
It’s Mozilla-based, and nothing makes this clearer than the fact that they had to abandon plug-ins at the same time that Mozilla did.
They “prefer” IMAP, but POP3 is fully supported as well, and thanks to a lot of user pushing the initial configuration of an account no longer religiously pushes IMAP over POP so much.
They support Gmail labels and folder organization. Whatever folders are in your Gmail account are mirrored locally in the Postbox client.
They are very strong in filtering, sorting, and disposition of messages. They offer a newsreader view of RSS feeds.
Right now I have 14 different email accounts being managed through Postbox. The accounts are clustered into three different groups. I can look at an individual inbox, or click the group and see ALL the messages in all the inboxes in that group in a unified, sorted info-card list. I can also file into folders if I want, or go to an individual folder and move the message somewhere else. All of that is reflected back to a Gmail source account because of IMAP.
Hope this helps,
I’m also on Catalina, and have not seen that problem with Postbox.
I was never able to diagnose the problem, but am currently thinking it may have been an issue with the DNS I was using. Going through Cloudflare sending mail seems fine at present.
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Does Postbox do image annotation?
Hmmm. I’ve never explored that. I use Skitch for that purpose, because it works in some form on both MacOS and iOS, it integrates with Evernote, and it’s free.
In that case you have to go through an extra app, right? In Mail, and now in Mimestream, you can annotate your images right there while you are composing. That’s very easy and straightforward. But it depends on your particular use case of course.
While that’s true, I wasn’t really replying to your post about Mimestream, Doug. My particular use for annotation is on PDFs in Preview, which I believe uses the same annotation tools as Mail.
I was responding to the earlier post about Postbox.