MailMate 2.0 Beta
I’ve been very quiet here, but I’ve actually been working on MailMate during all that time — which should be obvious based on the other blog post today about the latest beta and its release notes. For years now, the main focus has been on improving/maintaining MailMate and that is great for existing beta/test users of MailMate, but obviously it’s not great for generating revenue from new users.
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In the new license key setup, a MailMate license key is obtained by starting a subscription ($10 every 3 months). An active subscription means that MailMate will run in its “Paid Mode”. An inactive/cancelled subscription means that MailMate will run in its “Free Mode”. These modes are (almost) identical. Essentially, this means the price of a MailMate license key is now $10, but it is strongly encouraged to continue the subscription and for many users it is, in principle, required.
Why do it this way? First of all, paid upgrades are not a realistic option for me. It requires working on two versions of MailMate at the same time and I’ve clearly proven that I’m not able to do that. The first license key was sold more than 14 years ago and it is still valid!
Previously, it was a $50 one-time charge. One of the reasons it’s not a traditional subscription is that he had promised that 2.0 would be a free upgrade.
Maintaining software requires the same amount of effort as creating, but it is not a straightforward source of revenue. I do not think I can or should make major flashy rewrites which could justify upgrade fees. Instead, a large number of subscribers is going to be an incentive for me to focus on keeping existing users happy. This means iterative/frequent updates improving the details of existing features, improving performance, fixing bugs, and to at least some extent answering support emails. This is essentially how I’ve worked in the past.
When Paid Mode expires, MailMate will automatically switch to Free Mode. In this mode, you continue to have access to all features of MailMate, but it is not intended to be used by all users. If you are part of a business or you run a business relying on the use of MailMate then it is also required that you use MailMate in Paid Mode.
As described above, MailMate adds a header line to every outgoing email stating the email client used. In Free Mode, this header line will explicitly use “MailMate Free Mode” as the email client name. Most of your correspondents will never see this, but some email clients will display it when it’s available.
I recently purchased an M4 MacBook Pro with a nano-texture display and set up Mail app fresh on the new machine, which is running macOS Sequoia. In the following weeks, I encountered a bunch of the same old problems—the Mail main window sometimes fails to come to the front when clicking on the Dock icon, requiring one or more additional clicks; the Flagged mailbox lists some unflagged messages, which can be removed from the list only by moving them to a new containing folder and back again; Mail app refuses to quit entirely because it's connecting to Gmail; a message sometimes isn't marked as read when opened in a window; my column widths are forgotten when switching folders—as well as a new problem: the Unread smart mailbox showed a phantom count of 1 when no messages appeared in the folder.
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Although my immediate problem was solved, I started to wonder why Mail app hadn't downloaded that unread message. So for each of my email accounts, I used the Get Account Info contextual menu item to show the number of messages in each mailbox on the IMAP server, comparing it to the number of messages in each mailbox displayed in Mail app. To my horror, I discovered that there were multiple discrepancies, in multiple mailboxes, in multiple accounts. Mail app seems to download most of the messages from each mailbox, but for some unknown reason it doesn't always download every message from every mailbox.
This was the final straw for me, an irreparable loss of confidence in the reliability of Mail app. In my opinion, Apple Mail is a formerly great app, during the 2000s, that has steadily declined in quality since then and ultimately became shoddy. […] RIP Mail app, long live MailMate!
The IMAP problem I’ve been having with Apple Mail for the last few years is that some message moves/deletions don’t get synced to the server promptly. So if I view my account on my iPhone or Webmail I see a sampling of old messages—going back perhaps a month—still in the inboxes. Eventually those messages to get properly moved on the server, but by then new ones have taken their place.
MailMate's IMAP support appears to be flawless: unlike Mail app, MailMate downloaded every message in every mailbox for every account. How is it possible that one developer, Benny Kjær Nielsen, can succeed where an entire team of Apple engineers failed?
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Moreover, Apple Mail has some problems with junk mail filtering. As of macOS Ventura, there's no longer a way to mark a message as not junk that Mail mistakenly marked as junk. And my junk mailboxes accumulate old messages despite the fact that I set Mail to erase junk messages after one month.
Of course, if you have Apple Mail or MailMate you should be using SpamSieve.
Welcome to the club! I am fairly confident, based on your quality standards, that you will not regret it. I switched from Mail to MailMate in 2020 and have never regretted it.
Previously:
- 2024 Six Colors Apple Report Card
- Google Removing Support for “Less Secure Apps”
- Mail Data Loss in macOS 10.15
- MailMate 1.9
Update (2025-02-18): Jeff Johnson notes that Free Mode shows an alert when sending a message and is limited to sending two messages per launch. This seems reasonable to me but is not what I expected given the description of it being “almost identical” to Paid Mode.
Update (2025-02-18): Bernd suggests that the alert Johnson was seeing is due to the trial running out and that this is distinct from the Free Mode that you get after you pay once and stop paying. This is makes more sense given the documentation, so I guess the way to think about it is that there are actually four different modes.
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>> Update (2025-02-18): Jeff Johnson notes that Free Mode shows an alert when sending a message and is limited to sending two messages per launch.
Maybe only true if you never bought a license. Then you are after '30-day trial period' and not in the new 'Free Mode' that you get after cancelling the '$10 every 3 months' Paid Mode.
2011: MailMate now enforces a 30-day trial period. It is measured as days of active use measured by the number of days on which messages have been sent. When the trial period has expired, you can still use MailMate, but you can only send 2 messages per launch.
today:
MailMate can run in one of three different modes:
Trial Mode: After the initial download, MailMate runs in Trial Mode.
Paid Mode: Before trial expiration, you’ll need to get a license key to switch MailMate into its Paid Mode. You get the license key by starting a subscription paying for the ongoing development of MailMate.
Free Mode: When/if you stop the subscription then MailMate will (eventually) switch to its Free Mode.
I recently returned to MailMate on my new M3 MacBook Air, mainly because that involved jumping from Ventura (on my old iMac) to Sequoia (on the Air) and losing the ability to easily export from Apple Mail into DEVONthink. My paid licence still works, a rarity these days, and I will most likely subscribe later this year once the current licence runs out. Not only for the integration with DEVONthink and other apps, but for the Markdown email composer, customisable notifications, and — something that I wish more apps supported — being able to change the fonts used, and make them larger.
I've been trying MailMate since Jeff’s recommendation.
The app is a bit austere, but far more solid than Apple Mail: no unread counting issues, no IMAP problems, no rule issues, no SpamSieve issues (I know you did your best, but Apple Mail Extension system is now so bogus, it almost never works really properly) and the markdown editor is actually nice to use when we have the habit of using this syntax. So far, so good, I now use it on a daily basis !
For the licensed style, I think the best one I have met so far is the one Hopper Disassembler is using. You are paying for product updates, and once you stop paying, you can use the last version you have forever. I think it's a hybrid solution which works well for the 2 parties.
@Julien Yes, I found that the Mail extension stuff is incredibly unreliable, so SpamSieve now reads Mail’s database directly and moves the messages via AppleScript.
I have seen the “1 unread message” problem with a Gmail account in Spark, and occasionally in Mimestream. A folder - usually the primary inbox - shows one or more unread messages, but I can’t find any unread messages in the mailbox. I wonder if it’s a problem with Gmail and their weird implementation of IMAP.
(I only use Apple Mail with my iCloud account and it has worked fine.)
The one thing stopping me from using MailMate is that I don't want to use markdown in my emails. It's too imprecise, and too much of my natural writing style accidentally runs afoul of its formatting.
I want to use a nice WYSIWYG editor, like we've been enjoying since the advent of the Macintosh in 1984. If MailMate had one I'd switch in an instant.
Sigh.
I know I'm supposed to be happy for Benny, and really I am, but I can't help thinking this was a bit of an own-goal: he'd effectively, as he said, been developing two versions of the app in parallel, only one of which was actually publicised whilst remaining essentially dead. I guess I should be glad my licence key will give me some free time for most of a year—that's generous. And he's right that the principle function of the subscription is commitment to its development, with the header being the only advantage (any self-hoster of email will already have worked out that even this isn't a reason to pay, of course). And MailMate really is good software. So ...
And Jeff Johnson's right: Mail really is increasingly shit. And I too have seen the IMAP folder count mismatches (though so far I have put them down purely to UI issues, rather than actual sources of data loss or concern). I would love, to his point about local mailboxes, if MailMate had support for maildir++ and sendmail submission, so it could integrate with my other tools, like mblaze and mbsync, that already provide local syncing for IMAP mailboxes for other CLI software. This would then make support for a standard local folder a key advantage. The MailMate IMAP support is indeed rock-solid, however, the offline-first, local-only experience is unbeatable for reliability, if a little delayed.
In response to your blogpost, I looked back at my purchase records and discovered that I had purchased MailMate more than 9 years ago. I've paid nothing more for it since then, and it has been hugely useful to me. I'll be happy to support Benny by subscribing to it.
Hi,
This is good news for me, increasing trust that the best mail client I have ever used will stay available.
Best Wishes
Ari
User since 2014
