It’s sad because I like to tag my email and archive it. Postbox was very easy at doing that while Thunderbird and now emClient does not have hotkeys for that so a click in a side menu and select. It also presented the mail very nicely. Also Postbox let you store it’s address books, prefs, tags (topics) and filters in a shared folder like on Dropbox so you had the same config no matter where you ran it from (laptop/desktop).
I’ve got Thunderbird running and had it so for awhile now side by side but it has proven to be slow (even on M1) at rendering the email as well as trying to catch up, it’s just a bit slow and clunky. They have been working on it but the pace of updates is very slow unless you run the beta. They do have a plan to shift to monthly releases if you want to in the future but not sure when. Also they are suppose to have a sync service at some point to sync address books, tags etc so hopefully that’s coming soon. On the plus side there are a couple of extensions I do use, send later to schedule an email and Remindr to flag or have a pop up on email you need to follow up on later. Also quicktext for canned responses is one I use a lot (like Postbox responses).
Trying out emClient and while it’s not a native mac app it has some nice features including quicktext, send late, snooze as well as tags. There’s promise there, it’s also very fast like Mac Mail. Mail app is so close to being good but lacks features I need (like canned responses and tags). Airmail is pretty good too but I find they are falling behind in some areas and no tags.
Just my opinion - hopefully the folks at Thunderbird are going to get moving a little faster.
So… I installed emClient. It imports exceedingly well. I haven’t tried the calendar integration but it’s probably worth switching from Apple’s calendar servers someday regardless (since they break so often except in BusyCal).
It is incredibly configurable, including the skins, so you can set up just about all the backgrounds, fonts, etc. that’s a very powerful feature. It highlights every other line by default like Eudora used to, if I recall correctly. There’s a LOT of clever. It also has a key command to file messages into folders, with a search feature.
It might be Windows based but they really make it quite Mac-like. I have no complaints on that score.
I can’t really use it as my primary because my institution won’t accept it as an Exchange client. That’s a problem for most email clients which keeps me stuck with Apple Mail! (Or I guess whatever bloated junk MS has these days.)
I think it’s worth using the free trial before you make up your mind. It has some powerful features. I ended up shutting off a lot of them! but you do have pretty granular control, which is unusual.
That said, I also own MailMate and will try that for a week or two as well. I’d really like MailMaven from what I can see - but I’d also really like to just use Apple Mail if only they’d let me easily file messages into folders. What the !&*#@^! is up with that being missing? (I’d also like more control over the order of the accounts, how they display, etc., but while I’m wishing why not want to customize colors of folders in the Finder sidebar…)
It’s under very active development, but the developer is cautious about releasing ‘official’ versions (even betas). However, he releases regular test versions, the latest being at the end of August.
In general, I find the test versions to be very stable. There are occasional ones that have caused issues, but I don’t update to every new version (and avoid issues by waiting to see if others report any). Every few months I see what the latest one is, read through the release notes to see what’s changed, and if I haven’t heard of any issues on the mailing list I update to it. Signup for the mailing list and archives are on the contact page.
If you want somewhere to start, I’m currently running release 6056 (from 18 July) and it’s been very stable with my 142,670 emails and multiple accounts. That said, I’ve not heard of any issues with the latest test release (6065), so if you’re starting it’s probably worth using that one. And I highly recommend it, it has a lot of the great little touches Eudora did and much more, and is very configurable.
Another Eudora refuge here. . . I made it work until 2011, when I paid $18 for a GyazMail license.
Amazingly, 13 years later I am still using GyazMail. I just checked and I’ve created 516 “rules” (filters) over the years. (I’m somewhat OCD when it comes to my email.)
My wife and I use Runbox.com in Norway as our email provider with a personal domain. We’ve stuck with POP because switching to IMAP was never attractive to me; even 13 years ago redoing all my folders & filters was too daunting a project. And I’ve always tended to access my email from my primary Mac vs. my portable Macs and iOS devices.
I do not archive my email; anything worth saving (which ain’t much) is kept elsewhere. I used to save a lot in Eudora. I kept my software license info in Eudora since that is how such transactions were handled back then. But when I needed to resave everything I began keeping the software stuff in a password manager. I trashed a lot of messages when I finally deleted Eudora.
I have backup accounts at GMail and Proton and Runbox also offers webmail. But I have always preferred having my messages downloaded to an email client on my Mac. (I may finally be ready to delete my Google account since GMail is all I use and only rarely.)
GyazMail is a one-person show run by Goichi Hirakawa in Japan. The few times that I have needed tech support Goichi has responded pretty quickly. GyazMail is on the Mac Attorney list and he says positive things about it. But I doubt that the app attracts many email power-users.
Another Eudora-to-Postbox switcher here. I may stay with Postbox indefinitely.
One Postbox feature I didn’t see discussed above is the ability to edit a received email message before saving it. My main use for this is to change the subject line to reflect the topic that an email thread actually covers, making future searches for that topic much easier. Do any other email clients allow this?
And on this issue, I read the other day on a Postbox forum that the app’s latest updates removed this “edit” feature! Thank goodness I didn’t rush to update upon hearing about the sale! (I’m using v 7.0.60; I think the scuttlebutt was that the removal occurred in v 7.0.62.)
Yet another long time Eudora user. I eventually switched to Mac Mail and used it for several years, but I finally had to switch my work account to Postbox because of unpredictable fonts when replying. I have lots of “template” messages stored as signatures, and if I try to insert a signature at the top of a reply, the font and/or size is often different from what was in the prior message, even when it knows to match with the other message. It looks fine to me, but not to the recipient. Postbox handles this much better. Don’t know if I’ll use it until it dies, or start looking for another client. Wish the Eudora copyright owners would contribute the code to the public domain and allow someone else to resurrect it.
I, too, moved from Eudora, first to AppleMail, then ended up with Postbox (checking out others along the way) which I bought on Christmas eve, 2010. I just spent the last few weeks testing eM Client, and also checked out most of the other options listed here and elsewhere.
I’ve decided to go with eM Client, even though the modifications I made have not completely matched the workflows I had with Postbox. There’s enough similarity at this point that it’s worth it to me.
Other apps had one problem or another, or didn’t have an iOS app which I now want (and which PB never had, by the way). There are too many features that PB had (and which I’ve largely reproduced in eM Client) that AppleMail still doesn’t have. I’m not interested in a web-only app, and I left Gmail long ago (due to their data-mining practices via student Chromebooks at the school I was working at, and on general principle), so Mimestream is out. After being forced to wrestle with Outlook at various jobs over decades, I am thrilled to never look back on it again.
A bit off-topic: My e-mail providers are Fastmail and easyMail, and if either came up with a Mac + iOS app, I would definitely check those out, as both have been great, especially Fastmail. Importing them into eM Client and using them has been flawless.
I’m still puzzled why this particular and still important means of communication has been so hard to get and look right after such a long time.
A follow-on: One of the things I’ve disliked about Postbox is that it is one of the email clients that does not integrate with SpamSieve…so I’ve spent the past few years out in the wilderness, as has SpamSieve. My inbox ballooned to over 40,000 unread messages, almost all of them spamvertising. My recourse has been to set up Postbox filters to try to sift out some of the good marketing (and items like TidBITs) from the crap. Not ideal.
So I decided today to give Apple Mail another go. As I sit here I’ve migrated the one big email box (using IMAP, so no big deal), but it feels so limited. I have SpamSieve doing its thing, and it is in the process of winnowing out the junk after a cursory training. But I already know I’m not going to be happy with this…especially since I’ve wanted to integrate my email with the Activity panel on Busy Contacts, and I found out that Apple closed up all pathways to let BusyMac do that with the two most current MacOS releases.
So, the intersection of SpamSieve and Busy Contacts use turns out to be MailMate. Since I’m doing this winnowing using the IMAP interface on my own server, I’ll let the decluttering finish, then download the MM client.
Side gripe: it seems like contact managers and email clients are the most unstable applications to implement, relatively speaking of course. I don’t want to rehash all the excellent information above, but I fervently hope that (1) MailMate survives for a while longer, and (2) that BusyMac will someday release a Busy Contacts v2.
Thank you for that list. Rediscovered Edison Mail and am trying it out. Much better than it was.
Having a new 16GB M2 Air helps as well when running multiple Electron apps.
(I’ve been running Corona (on your Accounting list) since 2020. Best I’ve seen for my peculiar needs and nothing else works. Very hard to find, though.)
What I really appreciated about Postbox were all the frequent updates, at least a couple every month. And then they started slowing down.
Postbox moved to monthly subscription sales, and then added the option of a one-time licence, suggesting to me that they were experiencing financial difficulties. They also started charging for technical support, another indication of bank account problems.
Although I have looked into other options, but the time being, I’m going to keep using Postbox. R.I.P.
I’m using MailMaven as my primary email app, have been for several months. It’s still in beta but quite stable. I love the features. The beta team is super responsive.
Joe Kissell at Take Control Books is working on a book about MailMaven to be released when the product goes out of beta. It could be helpful to early adopters. 30% discount for TidBITS members.
What I especially like about Postbox is its clean interface. When you move from one account to another account, only the folders for that account are displayed in the sidebar, unlike in other email clients where it seems that you have to hide the folders from other accounts manually. If there are any other email clients that behave like Postbox in this respect, or if there is some setting that I have missed in other email clients, I would love to know. I also like the fact that Postbox is not afraid of colour, unlike Apple’s Mail.