MailMaven Public Beta

Looks nice -- the subscription model kills it for me. (and I /am/ in the market for a client that is able to display the correct unread mail count in the badge)

Totally fine with subscription, devs gotta eat, but $75/yr is too much.

I'm curious! I really need a new mail client. And I'm with CowMonkey -- Apple Mail's inability to actually count unread emails is maddening.

I appreciate that this isn't purely subscription pricing, too. You pay for a year of updates, but you're free to keep using the app after that year without updating. I've found this to be a good happy medium between paying once and full subscription pricing, similar to paying for major upgrades, where developers still get income for ongoing support but you don't have to worry about the software switching off.

> On the other hand, sometimes it would be handy to be able to just quickly filter the current display in situ

Currently the Message List do has a filter feature that will limit the messages to those containing specific words in subject, body or sender. as well as preset filters for unread, flagged etc. Click on the "All" to the right of the sort indicator to select different filters.

Also click on unread badge to filter by unread, Total count badge to remove filters.

And we will be working on AppleScriptibility. We know a lot of users want to integrate with other apps.

One step at a time.

@Scott Ah, that’s great. Somehow it didn’t click for me that “Phrase” was the way to get the search field to appear. I now see that there’s also a menu command and shortcut: Command-Control-Option-F.

There's also MailMate, which is quite nice: https://freron.com/

I hope they reconsider the pricing after year one because $50 a year is fine — that’s in-line with Mimestream — but $75 a year is a little much.

I don’t have a need for this because almost all my mail sans Apple Mail is in legacy Google Apps accounts and Mimestream is just great, but I’m glad to see other apps try to fill the pro email client gap.

Is a pricing scheme where you pay for a limited period of updates but the software doesn't switch off still considered subscription pricing?

I did a bit of beta testing for them. Was it 2 years ago already? The interface is super busy. The screenshot from Joe Kissell for the View Settings shows that. The color choices are not my favourite and the icons are too small.

@Bri I don’t consider it to be a subscription.

@Bri @MichaelTsai The thing that REALLY irritates me about "not a subscription" of the "one year of updates" is when devs ship software with manufacturing flaws, or as they're Newspeakingly-called called "bugs", and then expect the customer to give them money to remediate their product.

You sold me a faulty product, fixing it is on you, the Dev, not me, the customer. In the EU, software has a minimum 2 year warranty - that's 2 years of legally required bugfixes, 100% of features reliably working 100% of the time (like any other consumer product) *beyond* fixing every bug that was in the product at the time of sale. Those bugfixes cannot be held over for a paid feature upgrade, (which was always Adobe's favourite lark) and a failure to fix all the bugs triggers a refund of the purchase price.

A developer's cashflow is a "you" problem, and I'm investing in your software to solve a "me" problem. I will give you money, if you solve a "me" problem. But, sorry to say, your financial viability is not a "me" problem. Charge me $200, or $300 for the software if that's what you think its worth to solve *my* problem, but I'm not going to give you more money each year to keep solving the same problem you already solved. Software is not a utility like Internet access, or electricity, or water. I don't keep paying the builder every year for redoing my kitchen because I retain the ability to make meals in my home.

If a developer wants a cashflow unrelated to whether they actually make improvements to an app that customers think are worth buying for their own sake, go get a Patreon, or an OnlyFans account.

>they’re not sprinkling AI everywhere

LLMs can be pretty helpful for text-heavy applications like email. They're particularly good at auto-tagging and summarizing. And while I don't want to read a summary instead of an email, I think a summary would often be more useful to show in the list view than the email's first few words.

I wouldn't mind an email client with Ollama integration and some simple LLM features that aren't the usual stupid "write a whole ass response to this email that somebody else probably wrote using an LLM."

As long as bug fixes are free, I really support this kind of pricing model: you get to keep all the features you paid for and you only get new ones if you pay for another year.

But bug fixes MUST continue to be provided for everyone, otherwise as someone said above, you could be paying for a faulty product and then paying to have it fixed

Ah I think I have to take that back. Syncing labels stops when you stop paying, so that's a no from me

@Someone My thoughts exactly, thank you!

"But bug fixes MUST continue to be provided for everyone"

Everybody has a different cut-off date where their subscription ends, so at some point, they'd have to keep supporting close to all previous releases.

I don't think the "updates until your subscription ends, then keep using the last version" approach is a good idea. JetBrains' "perpetual fallback license" makes much more sense. As long as your subscription is active, you get all new versions. If your subscription ends and has lasted at least 12 months, you fall back to the major version available 12 months ago, which continues receiving bug fixes.

This is a model that combines buying and renting software into one system.

Just for some context here, let's keep in mind that Outlook is very expensive, used by millions, and is absolutely awful. And it seems Microsoft is the only company that has figured out how to make money on an email client.

And no matter how much you pay anyone, email remains awful, and all the mail clients are just making it slightly less awful at best.

@Someone Do you have an example? I don’t think that has ever actually happened to me with any significant bug. But, yes, I agree that if it essentially doesn’t do what was promised when you purchased (on the OS that was current when you purchased) that should be fixed. 100% bug-free is not a realistic standard for consumer software. Even NASA, with massively higher costs, slower development, and smaller systems, can’t do it.

@Plume Yeah, it’s not practical to have so many different branches. And even the JetBrains model is tricky because do you get infinite free bug fixes in response to changes to the OS or outside services? That doesn’t really make sense but is the source of most of the bugs I see.

@Tony Thanks for pointing out that the syncing acts like a traditional subscription. I think it does make sense for an ongoing service to have an ongoing fee. It doesn’t quite feel right that this fee is the full cost of the app, but breaking it into two separate fees/subscriptions would be awkward.

At the end of the day, I think this sort of subscription-but-skip-some-updates model makes sense for the customer if it’s an expensive tool that you don’t use very seriously, so it’s OK to not be current. If it’s regularly essential for your work or something like e-mail that you’re going to use every day, I appreciate having the theoretical choice to update on my schedule without the app just shutting off, but practically speaking I think you have to accept the product/pricing on offer and choose to use it or not use it.

"email remains awful"

Email is awesome. Despite Google's best efforts, it's a popular open standard for communicating on the Internet, which everybody can easily access. Apart from the web, Email is the best thing that has come out of the Internet.

"the JetBrains model is tricky because do you get infinite free bug fixes in response to changes to the OS or outside services?"

JetBrains releases at most one major version of each of its products each year, and (as far as I know) it currently doesn't have a cutoff date for critical security issues in older versions. I doubt they'll update old app versions to fix issues with new OS releases, but I think that makes sense from the buyer's point of view. Your application will continue to work safely on your current setup.

@Plume Yeah, e-mail is awesome. We would never have it so good were it being invented today.

I'm honestly not too worried about having a faulty product when the "year of updates" I pay for runs out, because I should have a working product well before then. If I don't, then the year long term doesn't matter because the product is *already* faulty, and I won't be paying for it again. If an update introduces new bugs then I will roll back to the previous working version.

The major reason to need a new version, outside of fixes for bugs you are already experiencing, is because you updated your system, but I don't update my system any longer. Many years ago I used to do the regular grind of keep things up to date, but as I'm sure many of you have experienced, with macOS that's a losing game now, and I don't need to reiterate the reasons why.

So that means that sometime within that year I will have a working version of the app that runs on the current version of my system. When the year of updates runs out, I will keep using that version until such a time I finally do decide to update my system, or circumstances otherwise conspire to require an update, and then if I still want the software, I will pay for the update, as is reasonable to do with commercial software.

It all seems pretty reasonable to me.

@MichaelTsai Well the most egregious example I've experienced that I can think of immediately is Adobe, back in the old days their GoLive web design app had a component technology where you could build a piece of a webpage, and then save it to a palette and use it in other pages, the bug it had was that it would rewrite resource and link path urls specific for the page in which it was used so everything worked when you were testing it locally, but it wrote them as absolute paths, rather than relative. So, when you uploaded the pages to the server, nothing worked. The fix for the glitch was held back until the next many hundreds of dollars paid upgrade of Creative Suite.

Let's see, Espresso, my web editor the drag & drop image wells don't work for CSS editing, the artwork chooser for sites in the Projects window doesn't work. This is the current version of the app, running on a supported (by the app, and by Apple) version of macOS.

It's all well and good to say software can't be bug free, but the counter to that is "well consumer law pretty much everywhere says products HAVE to be bug free, or the vendor has to refund people's money, OR keep fixing it until it works." Caveat Emptor, "sold as is" doesn't apply to retailed products and services.

Sure, developers can't anticipate every bug prior to release, but they can fix every bug once it's identified. THAT's the tradeoff - developers can sell broken things, but they have to keep doing warranty fixes until the customer is made whole with a product that is not broken.

See, the real crux of the matter is there is NO cost to a developer in making sure customers have "bugfree" software - the idea that it would make software unaffordable is simply not true, because it costs a developer nothing to give someone who has already bought their software a free update to the version they're currently selling in order to fix a bug. The developer HAS to fix the bug, because it's against the law to knowingly sell faulty products, so even if the fix requires a re-architected implementation in a new version of the software, that cost is already amortised by necessity in order to make and sell the new version to new customers.

What that argument is really saying is "foregoing the revenue of charging someone more money to fix a product that was faulty when sold, reduces the economic viability of our business". I don't think that's a reasonable basis for a *business* to conduct itself.

@Someone Interesting—that just doesn’t track with my reality at all. I would say that almost 100% of the apps that I use have bugs 100% of the time. Not necessarily a lot, but at least one that I encounter. (This is kind of subjective because rarely does an app ever specify in the documentation exactly what a feature is supposed to do.) But you’re saying that if I lived in the EU I could just get my money back for all these purchases every 2 years? And, by extension, everyone in the EU could get all non-perfect products for free? That doesn’t seem reasonable, either.

@MichaelTsai Well the point of product standards, and fitness for purpose is to raise the standards of products on the market. The Capture One community has a real thing about this when C1 announced their new upgrade plan was to only offer bugfixes *at all* to the most recent paid update, and updates were going to be annual *minimum* So you could buy software that has flaws, and get less than a year of warranty support.

Users countered with making sure everyone in the EU-based community understood their rights, and so you had people threatening to just buy, wait 2 years, demand a refund, and then rebuy as a way to be perpetually on a zero-cost licence. C1 could have easily avoided that by just having normal upgrade pricing, and complying with the law. Again, in the EU it's THE LAW you have to provide free bugfixes for 2 years (and you have to actually SOLVE the bugs at the end of that).

Obviously there is a difference between "this doesn't work the way I'd like it to" Vs. "this doesn't work the way you say it's supposed to". Again, a Capture One issue - the navigator palette, which shows a box outline overlay to demonstrate the relative image viewer's zoom relative to the whole image; if that palette is docked within another window, the box only acts correctly when that window is also functioning as the image viewer. If you have a separate viewer window and the palette is docked to what you're using as the image thumbnail browser, the zoom box indicator doesn't function. Float the palette as a separate window, the zoom box works.

That's "works as designed" - designed *badly* I'll grant, but not a warrantable bug.

I will confess to perhaps having less sympathy for developers costs with regards to this, primarily because I look at my own costs as a sole trader artist - I carry $20 million in public liability insurance in case one of my sculptures falls on someone, or burns their house down. It'd be nice to say it was made "as is", but that's not a reasonable option. How many software developers have a standard disclaimer "I'm not responsible if my software destroys your data", and how many carry insurance for that purpose?

@Someone Thanks. I’m glad to hear that it seems like the law helped in the Capture One situation.

@Plume @Michael

I agree in concept. But it seems to me Google and Microsoft have successfully duopolized it. I constantly have issues with email delivery to a long existing custom domain at Fastmail. If I want to be certain to receive an email, I send it to a Google or Microsoft hosted one.

And as we were discussing here, the clients for accessing it remain an issue. So we can't really host our own mail servers practically anymore, and we don't have a great mail client. That's why I said it remains awful. I love the concept, but the implementation is increasingly difficult to call open, and no one can seem to agree on a good mail client. And nearly everyone that makes a mail client is either making their existing one worse, or making a new one that plugs in only to Gmail, or at best, also Office 365.

I do completely agree that we would never get it today if it didn't exist in the early days before corporations took everything over and siloed everything off. I'm just worried that email has already effectively fallen victim to that.

I realize MailMaven does not do what I just described and does connect to other mail services. But then the first comment complains about the subscription. So once again, unless you're using the free one provided by the duopoly, it's hard to make a business out of it, so the silo spiral continues.

@Bart It’s a real problem, e.g.: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2023/09/11/today-in-e-mail-hegemony/