The Best Worst E-mail Client
Apple Mail is the first app open every day and the one I find hardest to defend, and I’ve been defending it for twenty years (longer if you remember the original NeXT mail client).
The broader story is one of abandonment.
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Apple deprecated that API, replaced it with a (much more restrictive) MailKit surface in 2021, and proceeded to lock MailKit down so hard that barely anyone shipped an extension.
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In particular, in this age of desktop AI agents, I come time and again across the fact that AppleScript support in Mail has been left to rot.
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And searching for messages is such a mockery of a user experience that I’m not even sure how to describe it[…]
The last email program I truly loved was Bare Bones’ Mailsmith.
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Now, I’ve tried a lot, like, a lot, of “modern” email clients. The built-in Apple email client is extremely straightforward, but underpowered. Thunderbird is too lumbering and heavyweight for what I want. Hipster ones like Spark are pretty, but focus on things I don’t care about. Mimestream is solid, but it’s Gmail-only. Microsoft Outlook is, unfortunately, Microsoft Outlook. MailMate is nerdy and, in some ways, the most obvious spiritual descendant of Mailsmith, but I find some of its UX inscrutable. Yes, I am aware of the irony of saying this just before describing an Emacs-based client.
And increasingly, commercial email clients are expensive and/or subscription-only.
I almost never use Mail on iOS 26. I just tried to insert an image from my photo library, and I could not figure out how to get back to seeing a keyboard. What a bizarre workflow. Still shocked some of this stuff shipped.
I haven’t been able to use Mail on macOS since macOS 15.4. It hangs on launch if any accounts are enabled. It feels like it’s been so many years since I filed feedback with sample logs and still Apple hasn’t fixed the hang.
I wonder whether I will ever see a time where Mail clients report accurate unread counts (spoiler: clicking on Inbox shows no new mall)
Well, I guess most other mail clients, Thunderbird or Outlook, get this right. But it never worked in any of the Apple mail clients. Like for decades now 🙃
Rishi Ó summarizes the promises for Mail later this year:
Improved Top Results
More reliable search indexing
Improved unread badge accuracy
Improved list formatting
iOS 27 has an overhauled search system that extends to the Mail app. Instead of surfacing results based on keywords and recency, Mail app search ranks results by relevance and intent.
I never found the problem to be relevance ranking but rather that it simply didn’t find certain messages at all.
Long press on any email and you can ask Siri to summarize, find an item in the email, track a package, get a flight number, save a photo, and more.
I guess that’s fine, but as Carmo notes there’s just a whole list of basics that need attention in iOS Mail.
Messages in Mail load faster, search indexing is more reliable, and unread badges between platforms like iOS and macOS sync more reliably.
Mail search is still garbage in iOS 27. 😞 It’s just not better like they claim.
Previously:
- The End of EWS in Mail and AppleScript in Outlook
- MailMaven 1.2
- Golden Gate Spotlight
- GyazMail 1.8
- MailMate License Model: One Year Later
- Mail Extension Postmortem
- Spark Switches to Electron and Subscriptions
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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.)
