Postbox Acquired by eM Client, Ends Development

Article Comments
1

Originally published at: Postbox Acquired by eM Client, Ends Development - TidBITS

Sad news. The longstanding email client Postbox has been sold to and shut down by eM Client, described by the announcement as “a leading email platform for Windows and macOS that combines email, calendars, tasks, contacts, notes, and chat into a single, easy-to-use application.”

Postbox users can continue to use the app indefinitely, but it will no longer be sold or developed. The company will continue to provide support through 22 December 2024, and the Postbox Help Center will remain available for another year, through 22 December 2025.

To ease the transition, the company is offering a 50% discount on a one-time purchase or the first year of an eM Client subscription for all users. Those who purchased Postbox after 22 September 2024 are eligible for a 100% discount, with these offers valid until 31 December 2024.

Built on Mozilla’s open-source Thunderbird, Postbox distinguished itself with powerful email management, advanced composition tools, and a customizable interface, attracting a niche yet loyal user base over 16 years. We first covered Postbox in the TidBITS Watchlist in 2010 (see “Postbox 2,” 1 October 2010). However, it hasn’t seen a significant update for 5 years (see “Postbox 7.0,” 9 September 2019). Although it has long been a serious contender among Mac email clients and TidBITS reader Patrick Dunn was telling me about its latest changes as recently as last month, I never found Postbox compelling.

On the other side of the equation, I’ve never heard of any Mac users relying on eM Client, despite its cross-platform status. I was going to say that I’d never heard of it at all, but searching my email reveals that I tested it briefly in February 2022. I suspect it’s a Windows app that has been clumsily ported to macOS. (Ironically, I was just encouraged by a PR person to look at Mailbird, another Windows email client that just released a version that runs on the Mac but bears little resemblance to a true Mac app.) eM Client gained iOS and Android clients only this year.

Competing in the email client world is tough, given that Apple’s bundled Mail is a solid app and Microsoft Outlook is free for Mac users. I suspect there’s room for small, focused companies to carve out niche markets, but generating the sales needed to support a larger staff is likely challenging. The Gmail-specific Mimestream—supported by a several-person company—is still my current client of choice (see “Why I Use Mimestream for Gmail,” 24 May 2023).

Postbox users, although there’s no need to decide immediately, where are you looking to migrate your email? Along with the company’s encouragement to move to eM Client, Thunderbird would seem to be an obvious choice, or you could jump to Mail, Outlook, or another app.

2

I’m still waiting to see what https://smallcubed.com is up to with https://mailmaven.app . Was it over a year ago they talked about having a Mac Mail Client after Apple killed their extension business? (I miss the macro keystrokes to port email into specific folders a lot and have paid a subscription fee solely so they can work on it).

Mac Mail has a lot of strengths but its falling behind a lot compared to gmail and outlook.

2 Likes
3

What a sad end of an app.

I have downloaded em Client some time ago but totally forgot about it. The feature comparison for the different versions is longer than my arm. And - of course - em Client doesn’t have any substantial AppleScript support.

I joined the MailMaven beta a year ago. There hasn’t been any progress.

1 Like
4

I liked Postbox quite a bit but there were a few things I was missing so I switched back to Mail with the msg filer add-on. Recently I discovered Mailmate and it does pretty much everything I want and the search is really fast. It’s just one guy working on it so it could probably go at any time but it’s working great for me now.

2 Likes
5

I used eM Client for about 6 months earlier this year but switched back to my preferred email client MailMate a couple of months ago. eM Client has some nice features but lacks others, notably in my case SpamSieve integration. I’ve been very happy with MailMate.

1 Like
6

Oh no! I’ve been using Postbox since I was asked to review it by a magazine years ago. It was so good, I paid for a license and have upgraded ever since. While wonky at times, it really fit the way I worked and use email.

I suspect I’ll migrate to the Mail app, but it’s an opportunity to try out others. I used Mailsmith well past its expiration date and then wrote some code to export its mostly mbox-compatible mailboxes to Postbox. I require mail software that is superb at searching.

2 Likes
7

@ace You’re spot on about a Windows app ported half-assed to the Mac. I keep trying even numbered versions and they still suck.

@pkg & @beatrixwillius As for MailMaven, I’m using it as my primary tool at the moment. Still a work in progress, but they are making progress.

8

sigh I miss Eudora!!!

I switched from Apple Mail to Postbox a few years ago because Mail was acting flaky (I can’t recall how offhand) and had smarter smart mailboxes, and other reasons I can’t remember.

I avoid anything that’s subscription, Google or Microsoft, so the alternatives seem limited. I guess I’ll hang on to Postbox while I can.

Oh well…

1 Like
9

If Postbox is Thunderbird with added features, perhaps there is a Thunderbird add-on (or collection of add-ons) that can provide most of its features?

2 Likes
10

Wow, I was afraid this day would come. I’ve been using Postbox for well over a decade, since switching from Eudora, I think. I think it’s awesome… I’ll give Em Client a try, but maybe I’ll just switch to Mac Mail. I’ll certainly be following this thread to see what people think.

2 Likes
11

(Cue gnashing of teeth sound) - Why do the good apps I use seem to invariably go away??

Obviously Postbox will work for a while, but the writing is on the wall and I’ve started shopping for the replacement. In a day of looking though, I haven’t found anything that suits me exactly. I’ve taken quick looks at MailMate, MimeStream, Thunderbird, Apple Mail (again) for starters.

What I like in Postbox is readability of the window. Mailboxes down the left. Then a pane with columns for Flag/Topic/Subject/From/Recipient/Attachments/Date. With a quick scan I can see a lot of data at once.

I particularly like Postbox’s use of Topics which assign a text category to a message AND change the color of the whole line. I use RED for messages that need action, BLUE for messages in progress, GREEN for non-profits I deal with, etc. It’s not just a small colored flag, but it changes the text of the whole line to a color. It makes it very easy to see messages that need attention and those that don’t.

I also appreciate having separate columns for FROM and SUBJECT. It again makes it easier to scan quickly.

MailMate comes closes, but doesn’t seem to have the color coding option. And it just seems more crowded and hard to read to my eye.

Mimestream seems well crafted and responsive, but I really don’t like seeing the message FROM stacked on top of the SUBJECT; hard to read quickly. And ideally it would have IMAP support to so I could easily check my iCloud account. But I can live without that for in Mimestream for now too if I have to.

Bonus to Postbox also for having an RSS Reader option too, but I can find this elsewhere I guess.

The color coding of a whole line with some sort of tag and the grid layout of Subject/From/Date are really what I’m looking for. If anyone has more suggestions, post 'em here, please.

12

I am still surprised by the loyalty to Postbox: it’s not a “native” (Cocoa/AppKit) app, either. Maybe more important to someone like me, because accessibility. I tried EmClient, and it looked promising but was, itself, not quite accessible.

So MailMate’s where it’s at. That, and Apple Mail. I wish MailMate would read mail from the local filesystem—it’s IMAP-only—but that’s a small price to pay for what’s otherwise an excellent and super-powerful mailer. Long may it continue. Apple Mail just slides further and further into mediocrity, but local folders, rules and POP make it a good all-purpose default app that I can use on my spam filter drone machine.

13

I, too, switched to Postbox from Eudora. I rely heavily on Postbox’s middle column, where I can click on a favorite contact, a tag I’ve applied, or an attribute to see only certain emails. I also heavily use its filters to apply tags, which, because it’s whole colored line, enables me to quickly see emails from clients, family members, etc. It also enables me to quickly see all the emails related to a specific project, even when the participants are in different organizations. I’m going to miss all of this.

I use Spark on my Android phone and iPad. It’s got great features for dealing with emails that need to leave your email system, but not all the other features. Since I have a Setapp subscription, I’m going to test Spark and Canary Mail, which are the two included email apps.

But I’m really sad. :frowning: . And email is too important to continue using something that isn’t supported after December.

2 Likes
14

I still run Mailsmith on a legacy machine/macOS. Postbox came close enough that I bought a license but could never fully commit to using on a regular basis.

So the problem with using 3rd party email continues. They work well until they don’t.

15

I am not a Postbox user, but some of the things folks mention, like being able to collect mail on an ad hoc basis meeting a set of criteria, can be achieved by using a set of rules to create a Smart Mailbox in Apple Mail or other apps with similar features. If you reference those criteria often, name the smart mailbox; otherwise, delete it when you are done to reduce clutter.

You can use the same technique for photos (Smart Albums), music (Smart Playlists), and files (Smart Folders). One of the significant failings of mobile OSs is the lack of this capability.

4 Likes
16

Some of these Mail programs sound really great. I have only used Apple’s Mail and am always baffled by the structure. If I want to search in a particular folder, I search, and it searches all mailboxes, then I have to go to the folder and search again. I would love color coding and other ways to cull down my inbox. Maybe their AI implementation will help, but I doubt it.

17

Just to note that if this is something that can be automated, you can use a rule to color code messages. For example, if you want every message from your wife to be red, you can create a rule to do just that.

Settings, Rules tab. Add a rule. Set the condition (e.g., “From”, “contains”, whatever condition text that you want.) Under “Perform the following actions”, choose “Set color”, choose whether you want background or foreground color, which color you want, and that should do it. When you save the rule it will even offer to run the rule against your stored messages.

3 Likes
18

Ugh. I settled on Postbox as a replacement for Powermail, because it seemed stable and based on a common enough format that it should be easy to import and export to other clients.

I’ve got a corpus of 25+ years of email messages in my PowerMail archive (which is still being used on my iMac server that runs High Sierra), and my original plan was to export from PowerMail to Postbox. PowerMail’s search feature is lightning fast and perfectly accurate, but once I started accumulating emails in Postbox I found its search features were pretty terrible - I regularly get no hits on a search term, even though I have an email with that search term open at that very moment. So I wound up exporting my PowerMail corpus to Michael Tsai’s EagleFiler, and exporting the new emails in Postbox into that same EagleFiler archive on an annual basis. Unlike Postbox, EagleFiler’s searches are fast and accurate, although it can mangle formatting a little.

If anyone has suggestions for email clients with fast and accurate searches, and the ability to export to EagleFiler, I’m all ears.

19

About a year or so ago, I switched from Apple Mail to Gmail by adding my email account to it. I primarily use Gmail for two reasons; numerous add-ons and extensions are available, and I can read my email on (almost) any browser.

20

Gmail’s certainly one of the more convenient and cheapest email providers available. But it’s not an email client, which is what Postbox is. As a provider, most email providers have a web interface, so that’s not really an advantage for Gmail, and for some of us the fact that Google reads all your email for commercial purposes rules it out as a provider.

3 Likes