The Best Worst E-mail Client

MailMate is probably the most Mac-assed email client I've ever used. The only reason I no longer use it is because, ironically, it helped me hack down my email to a much more manageable size and volume and made itself somewhat redundant as a result.

These days I just use the Fastmail desktop app, which is built on Electron but is surprisingly good and pretty much covers all my day-to-day needs. I probably shouldn't be surprised, since the Fastmail folks actually care about email.

When Apple decided to jump back into the PIM game with iPhone, I'd REALLY hoped that they'd spend a bit more effort on improving the basic Personal Information apps they shipped. They have NOT. I harp on this all the time (it seems), but the fact that the Mac had better PIM/CRM tools available before Jobs returned to Apple (or thereabouts) is disgraceful. Now Up-to-Date, Palm Desktop/Claris Organizer, Lotus Organizer, ACT!, Entourage!!! I've harped to Apple people now for over 25 years about how craptacular the tools that Apple brought forward from NextSTEP WERE, and now—nearly 20 years on from the iPhone—it is just an abysmal failure on Apple's part to improve how humans COMMUNICATE… which was the basic PROMISE the iPhone was supposed to usher in. Sure, we have new WAYS (FaceTime), but the Contacts app is worse than the little address book my grandma kept (and far less informational), the Phone app doesn't do much more than my circa 2000 Sony phone, and the Mail app… oooof… what can I say about that thing?? It isn't even as good as Eudora ended up, much less Entourage at its peak! We have Messages, but no way to 'SEE' all of the various chains of communication I might have with a contact or business in a CENTRAL location. I'm not asking for much (I don't believe)… I'm just asking for what should have come after **20 years**. IMHO. (Even the old telephone company wasn't THAT lackadaisical. After all, we DID get Touch Tone, were allowed to use answering machines, could tell who was calling us without answering, and even the ability to take a call on the ski slope!)

I expected more. Dumb me. (Oh, and with the EWS/Mail.app news from yesterday… sigh… I cannot even.)

I've tried many times over the years to use Apple Mail on my iPhone and Mac. It's always been terrible beyond belief. For that matter so is Outlook. I don't understand how these multi-trillion dollar companies with infinite resources can bork up something as simple as an email client (both are terrible at Search which is unforgivable).

I use Fastmail and it checks all the boxes. No complaints whatsoever.

When it comes to Apple Mail, I'm starting to realise I must be an outlier. I started using it in Mac OS X 10.1, and it has my main email client ever since; it currently manages four main email accounts, but it has been dragging along 25 years' worth of archives (meaning hundreds of thousands of messages) without a single issue. Granted, I'm still on Ventura, so it's quite possible Mail has got worse in subsequent releases. But yeah, I'm pretty much in the same position as Watts Martin, only that in my case, after trying other email clients, I always get back to Mail.

I don't have particular email needs other than writing/reading/organising emails in an uncluttered, straightforward interface; so Mail works well for me.

The only third-party client I would instantly leave Mail for is Mailsmith, if it were still actively developed. I've used it to manage a bunch of secondary accounts and all the accounts I used to use to participate in forum mailing lists, and it was great. Not supporting IMAP was obviously what killed it for me.

On iOS, Mail has always been 'okay' for me, but again, the only thing I do with email on a phone is to read urgent emails. Nothing more, as on a phone I hate doing any typing longer than inserting search terms in the browser or providing a quick response on social media.

But I agree with the general sentiment: considering the money and resources these big tech companies have, it's just staggering that they can't come up with better email software.

I'm with Ricardo on this; I use Mail on both desktop and mobile. It isn't great and indeed unable to find any messages but there also really isn't an alternative. On Windows I'm holding out with classic outlook for as long as I can. The linux situation with email clients is no better, which means im using webmail.

I'm getting the feeling that the actual play is to self-host something like Cypth or Snappymail instead of trying to find a native mail client without pretty clear downsides.

I used Mac Mail for decades until they iOS'fied it. It got so much worse. Searching sucks - it constantly searches EVERYTHING when all I every care about it searching the mailbox I'm in. I switched to eM Client and its so much better. I love the feature where I can include all the Inboxes of all my accounts in a single Smart Folder.

iOS Mail has always sucked. It does let me show all the inboxes in one like eM Client on the Mac. But search is HORRID. It never finds messages, even recent ones. iOS 27 did not fix that in the least. I wonder if there is a better on the Mac. I use the Fastmail app but I am not a fan of some of its choices.

@Matt Searching a single mailbox still works for me in Mail, but they switched it so that you have to select the mailbox after starting the search. The All Inboxes feature is also still there, but you may have to opt in by hovering over Favorites in the sidebar and clicking the + button.

If Apple just gave us Boolean operators, that would be leap and bounds better than what we have today.

For me though, WhatsApp and iMessage have replaced the usage of email to such an extent, that email is not just for official communication with institutions rather than individuals.

* that email is now just for

@Riccardo,
Be careful when you upgrade. I also have 25 years of archives. More recent versions of macOS don't import/export to MBOX format very well. You'll lose about 5% of messages each time.

What you do is instead is identify the mailbox folders deep inside ~/Library/Mail/V10/. Archive those. Then, when you import, import using Apple Mail format instead of MBOX. I haven't lost a single message that way.

I've used mail.app since I moved from MacOS 9 to OS X around 10.2, and at one point it destroyed a bunch (years worth of) of archived messages I'd kept in "On My Mac" local mailboxes. This was pre-time machine, it munged messages together so a single mail would have chopped and randomised headers, and random sentences, like all the messages had gone through a teleporter pod together.

So now I only keep mail on a (imap) mail server, and mail still doesn't seem to get the exact same counts as thunderbird or mailmate. There are messages it just flat out won't see / count. I'll never trust mail with local storage again.

@Someone This is part of why I wrote EagleFiler, to safely keep most of my mail outside of Mail. (Sometimes such munging can be caused disk problems rather than an app bug, so it also checksums everything.) It’s normal for message counts to be different in Mail because it hides duplicate messages.

I'm using both MailMate and Thunderbird. I'm glad Thunderbird exists but it's not easy to love. I did try to switch to Apple Mail at one point years ago, but it didn't take. Now I'm afraid to try it.

In my more nostalgic moments, I think back to Entourage, or long for the days of Claris Emailer, though I don't miss the database corruption.

Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our email clients.