“Mail is Apple’s stock Mac OS X app for dealing with email. With Mail you can read, and reply to email messages. With Mail 7, Apple had to deal with a range of unwanted bugs, not least of which was troublesome beaviour between Mail and Gmail,” Lou Hattersley writes for Macworld. “These are all fixed now, and our Mail 7.2 review can focus on the program itself.”
“While there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with Mail, it has a reasonably slick interface and good search and Smart Mailbox functionality,” Hattersley writes. “But there seems to be a new breed of email client appearing, like Inky and Airmail that takes cues from social media apps (the Twitter client in particular). While Inky and Airmail also have flaws, they seem to have a modern take on what an email client should be. Apple’s Mail app (coming up to its third year without a major facelift) is starting to feel left behind.”
Much more in the full review here.
Awesome. The Mail client works. Now, iTunes?
I don’t get a huge volume of email, and even at my work, where the number is higher, I have rules to sort/archive things, and I deal with things pretty much as they’re received. Email is only difficult if you get ridiculous volumes of it (in which case most of it is probably rubbish) or you let it get too far out of control. I find most of these new apps are gimmicky and I’ve given up on them.
Yeah, posting to facebook is way down on my list of desirable features for an email client.
Why does it matter if Mail hasn’t been tarted up if it still does the job well ? Alternative mail apps ( with acknowledged flaws ) may be of interest to a journalist, but for those who rely on e-mail, using a solid, well-integrated and familiar app counts for a lot.
For me, it’s much more important that I have an e-mail app that works reliably and which I don’t have to think about how to use it.
In the past I’ve used a number of other e-mail apps and have cursed the disruption that’s inevitable while changing. There would either have to be an incredibly compelling alternative, or else Mail would have to really screw up before I contemplated changing again.
“Why does it matter if Mail hasn’t been tarted up if it still does the job well?”
Well and simply said.
Remember when WAVE from Our Lady of Perpetual Beta was going to replace all email, taking communication to a wonderful new level of collaboration and social?
In other insightful punditry today, it has been pointed out that forks, ball-point pens and chairs haven’t been tarted up for YEARS.
The thing with apple email is that they work fantastic on iOS, yet on OSX the apple mail is fiddly and hard to organise things. Why can’t the designers of iOS Mail app also develop the osx mail app? The difference in user experience between the 2 apps is so great that it have to be a case where 2 separate teams each developed the mail app. I say sack the osx mail app developers and give the task to iOS Mail app developers to develop the mail app for osx
I agree with you. It is so easy to move messages from folder to folder in IOS Mail. Why is it more difficult in OSX Mail? I can run through my email much quicker with IOS.
I feel the same, and iOS mail played a large part in nailing the coffin for blackberry, thank god for that, the fiddly osx mail if used on iOS would not pose the same threat to blackberry and other competitors
I like the comments here but I don’t get how moving messages to a folder with OS X Mail is difficult. I move messages to folders all day. Just drag-and-drop. Maybe you don’t Show Mailbox List? That’s where I see all of my folders and they are spring-loaded making it quite easy to use closed and nested folders.
This article is CRAP:
1) OS X 10.9.3 Mavericks has NOT been released to the public yet and one of its prime foci is fixing MAIL. So no, 7.2 does NOT fix everything.
2) Apple Mail 7.x was SPECIFICALLY a facelift. Has this person even LOOKED at or USED Apple Mail 7?
How does dreck like this get published? Seriously! Hey MacWorld! Do you give a rat’s what gets published in your name these days? Recall the INCREDIBLY stupid writer who insisted that we all use BitTorrent to STEAL copies of old versions of OS X warez off the Internet.
IOW: MacWorld, you’ve turned into MAJOR SUCKAGE. I am one extremely disappointed paying reader. 😯 😯 😯 😛
If you want some Quality Mac Writing visit my net friend Topher Kessler‘s work at:
http://www.macissues.com
And oh look. They left comments off at the source site for this stupid article.
“How does dreck like this get published?”
Why not ask Mark Hattersley, the editor of Macworld UK why he published this article by Lou Hattersley ?
I wanted to via comments. But as I pointed out, oops no comments.
I was part of a consortium who ripped on MacWorld for publishing the steal-OS-X-warez article. We managed to get an apology and retraction out of the author.
I hate to admit it, but my e-mail needs are simple- I still use AOL. It just works as I need it to- with pretty decent spam filtering.
Me too, but I have had nothing but problems with Mail and my AOL accounts since Mavericks. Mail is constantly caching and recaching and resynchronizing every email and attachment in every mailbox. Starts again, as soon as it finishes and takes forever each time. I have performed every fixit option available, from simple to nuclear, countless times and continue to have problems on 2 iMacs and 1 MBP. This article is completely baseless. I’m glad to here that auramac is not having trouble with AOL, it gives me hope!
I’ve experienced the same exact thing. Mail sucks the life out of my processor and there has been little that can be done about it. It’s like a curse with the gods in Cupertino wanting to play havoc with Google. IMAP accounts with google are prone to it, and after wasting an afternoon at an Apple store (not my normal store) I chewed out the manager for making excuses for an idiot behind the. Genius Bar.
I thought that Apple was serious when I reported the experience via answering a survey. I actually received a call from my normal store’s business department as I am a member of their Apple “Partnership”? program (for priority service).
I then visited my normal store and their genius put his best efforts. After a few hours he wrote up a report and promised me that it would be given escalated priority in Cupertino.
That was during the winter. It is now summer. Another WWDC behind us. It’s time for the engineers to drop everything and make a reliable app for Yosemite, or it will be like a waterfall there with an endless flow of users leaving Mail and thus depriving Tim of his vision of ” seemless experience”, regardless of device.
Apple mail 7.2 is a joke.. many many times the emails dont come into my inbox and i have to restart it as do a few of my clients.. major issues with it. doesnt work well with gmail nor exchange… horrible 2 out of 5 stars…
Yeah, this is really irritating. I have to now use my iPhone to alert me of emails that I’ve missed in OS X Mail.
A workaround is to customize your toolbar to show the Take All Accounts Offline (lightning bolt) and Get New Messages icons. If you suspect you have missed a message, click the first icon, wait until all accounts are offline, then click the second icon.
“While there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with Mail” ????
Really ! How about encrypting email attachments? That little over sight could have HUGE implications for anyone who trusted Apple’s previously superior security reputation. Apple has really let its quality control go lax while it spends its effort flattening what used to be attractive GUIs.
I was going to say this was a poor article but I don’t think it was actually an article at all. The subject was a question and I think it truly was a question. It has some background info, a bit of an intro, and the writer’s opinion but it just ends. I think they truly wanted to spur some discussion to find out what people think and I was hoping someone would answer the question.
Having used Mail from day-one, I have moved completely over to Thunderbird twice looking for a bit more of a solid and power-user experience (I do a lot of email). Each time I find it has its own issues and looks just dreadful in comparison. I come back to Mail and its clean simplicity. It just works (except for that terrible missing email issue that still occurs), is pleasant to look at, and integrates with other apps seamlessly.
If someone has a serious alternative I’d love to hear about it.