“After Mac OS X 10.8, Apple Mail has been going downhill by every update. It’s weird because the iOS Mail app is rock solid,” Jack Zimmermann writes for JackenHack. “Apple Mail has become a slow, unreliable application although they have fixed some of the more serious problems in the latest release. For the first time in many years, I was on the lookout for a new email client software.”
“I wanted to be able to have both of my private and work email accounts in the same program, but have them totally separate to make life easier, and after searching the net I found an application called Airmail [introductory price: $1.99],” Zimmermann writes. “Airmail is fast. I mean, really fast! I just bought a new MacBook Pro 15″ Retina with a 2.5Ghz Intel i7, so it’s probably not the best computer to pass any judgement on the speed of an application, but my computer at work is a three year old MacBook Pro and Airmail feels very fast on that machine as well.”
Much more in the full review here.
Agree on both counts that Apple Mail is not as good as it once was, and that Airmail is a great replacement. I’ve been using Airmail for sometime now and I agree with the sentiments, though it does have its own problems from time to time (similar, in fact, to the problems of Apple a Mail but not nearly as frequent).
Is it too early to ask anyone how the beta Yosemite version of a Apple Mail is performing?
I have been testing this very thing with my heavy and challenging email use pattern.
There is a material difference, especially with Gmail. Looking forward to the full and final version.
I haven’t had any problems so far with six different email accounts
Airmail is great, but as far as I’ve seen, it doesn’t do smart folders, which is a huge deal breaker for me.
agreed. Airmail is a nice app, but I moved back to Mail.app because of smart folders also.
I have a lot of complaints about Apple software giving a less pleasant user experience with each update but I can’t say I’ve noticed this in Apple Mail. None of the complaints here are specific. How, specifically, is Apple Mail going downhill?
Me too. No problems. No “what the heck happened to this program?” moments.
I noticed in the last version that you can no linger click and drag to dpselect a group of emails without one opening. Used to be you could select a group and drag them to the trash without opening any.
Seems like I’ve had a few other small problems like this.
On the other hand I have noticed that search is getting faster when it has to search on the server.
Since Mountain Lion, IMAP only works about 50% of the time for me.
Sometimes I will receive a mail notification on my iPhone, but it’ll never appear on my computer unless I quit and reopen the app. Sometimes I’ll come home and see a bunch of messages in my inbox that were deleted earlier in the day via my work computer or iPhone. Again, my only recourse is to quit and reopen the app. Sometimes it gets a wild hair and just decides that my password is invalid (Given: this could be a server issue, but it happens often enough that I don’t think so, and it’ll still work on my iPhone).
The problems with Gmail are well documented as well.
Here’s one:
Mail does not display count of items selected anymore. It instead shows useless display of email documents on top of each other. I thought skeuomorphism was dead.
Apple Mail….uughh!
If only they would fix the weird font re-sizing issues in HTML email. There is a whole forum on Apples site regarding this issue going back years, yet they just ignore it.
Boo hoo! Ha!
I ran into the font re-sizing nonsense for the first time this past week. Not acceptable. How the frack?! Bad show Apple!
I probably haven’t run into it much because I typically use plain text.
Not quite sure what they are talking about here, either.
A lot of the third party apps are not “better” but different. I am not seeing better, considering the screen shots and examples shown, and I haven’t seen what’s so bad about Mac Mail.
I believe when people mark down a given product, yet they don’t provide any examples, they are touting hot air to hear themselves speak. People like to be experts even if they don’t know anything.
Mac mail, what is it, Rock Solid or Slow and Unreliable? Seriously that is such a stupid paragraph.
How rock solid does a mail app have to be? I have 15 mail account, AOL, Yahoo, Gmail, Me/iCloud/Mac, MSN/HotMail/Live, Vemio and Exchange. I have over 5GB of mail.
Any problems I have are with the services, not being up all the time.
I use smart folders, quite a bit. Unified accounts are a simple matter of selecting the master inbox, and just as easily, any of the other sub inboxes.
Airmail is what’s left over from Sparrow. So who knows.
I’m going to check it out.
IMAP has become so slow in mail.app that I had to dump it. Maybe its the app itself but its become dog slow. Sync a folder and it hangs forever. The last 2 times it updated its mail database it beach balled for an eternity and I had to blow it out of memory, nuke my prefs and take it back to stock to get it going again.
I’m on freakin’ outlook 2011 at the moment which looks dated so I’ll def take a look at this app.
I really, really want to love Airmail. It’s so close to being an excellent application. But every time I use it, it feels just rough enough around the edges that I can’t feel confident in it.
For example, the search keyboard shortcut pulls up the text entry box but doesn’t place the cursor in it, making it so you have to use the mouse anyway. And the text that appears when hovering over a link in a message sometimes shows up on a different message window. Little things like that that add up.
I guess coming from Sparrow I’m a bit spoiled (I still use it on my primary machine, where it runs like a dream), but until they polish it up a bit more, it won’t be ready for prime time.
Seems to me Apple made a deal with “developers”. The deal being to make all Apple apps suck so developers can sell software on both iOS and OSX.
Seems to me that you don’t use Apple software.
I’m also not sure what’s with the Mail app negativism. I’ve used it for years with few issues to consolidate my multiple email accounts, IMAP and POP alike.
I suspect some if the negativity may be related to third party apps like gmail changing their feature set and it not playing well with Mail.
I’ve also noticed the people who complain the most to me about Mail becoming sluggish are the same ones who leave all their email in their Inbox, rather than filing it away in some folder structure in the app, forcing the app to actively handle thousands of old read emails whenever new unread email arrives.
I have tens of thousands of emails over years stored in my Mail app’s folder structure, and Mail handles them all fine, instantly pulling them up when I do routine searches for items I’ve filed, but forgotten where. I think the trick is just to move read emails out of the Inbox, and all will be fine.
Hi!
I wrote the blog post from my perspective. I use Gmail (Google Apps) with iMAP. I also manage 45 users at work that use Apple Mail connected to Google Apps. Apple Mail doesn’t work very well with iMAP connected to Gmail. Missed synced folders, multiple half written email messages saved to draft (Apple has fixed this in a update now) and other similar problems. Google doesn’t follow the iMAP standard and uses tags instead of folders, so all developers, including Apple have to accommodate for that. So Google is to blame here as well, but the reality is that a lot of people use Gmail, and right now Apple Mail doesn’t work as well as it used to.
I adhere to zero-inbox, so I don’t have a s***load of emails in my inbox.
Airmail fits the way I like to work, it might not suit you…
Why use Gmail? It’s not a free service because Google mines your data to send you targeted advertising. If Google wanted gmail to work with Apple Mail they would program accordingly. It’s not Mail, it’s google.
Google Docs is just shit. It makes Word look good. They’re worth less than free, just crap. I have to use GDocs at work, so I’m not just saying that – it’s really shite.
Things I find better about Air Mail in no special order:
1. It’s fun to use. This is something you seldom hear about a mail program. Granted this is a matter of opinion, but I really like the program. It beats the crap out of Apple’s mail, including the updated Yosimite version.
2. I like the U.I. I like the way it looks. It’s a larger departure from the look and feel of Apple Mail, without begin a radical change in the way the program operates. The sidebar is dark with white text which provides a pleasant contrast to the message viewing area. The sidebar is extremely readable presenting your unified inbox and all folders as well as a smaller sidebar showing accounts with account pictures. Easy to select different views from the side bar.
3. I like setting up and controlling accounts in Air Mail. OMG you can get into such a quagmire the with setting up smtp in Apple Mail. It seems to randomly mess with things when there is a problem. If there is a problem I don’t want the mail program to do a damn thing. Just report the problem. All settings for all mail accounts could be completely discreet. I don’t care if they’re all GMAIL. AirMail does this.
4. Signature Editor is a nice Markdown / HTML editor.
5. I love the “Show all messages from this sender button.” I get a crap load of junk mail. It’s often not clear that much of it comes from the same sender. I don’t have time to go through all the email headers and figure that out. If I click one message, then click the “Show All Messages from This Sender” button, I get a list of all messages from that sender. I can select them all, label them junk or just delete them. Big time saver. Even stuff that collects like newsletters. After a while you can 50 of those things in your inbox. With this button they’re instantly gathered together for disposal.
6. More robust rules editor.
7. Activities Window is much more informative than the activity window in mail. It shows all connections, status of connection and folder.
8. Compose editor features HTML and Markdown
9. Services. You tell AirmMail to keep your attachments on different services like dropbox.
10. It’s fast as mentioned.
I still use Apple’s mail. I keep it open, it stays updated in a corner, and if I ever need to go back to it in a hurry, it’s there.
Mail has always been fine on my Macs over the years – we all (13 of us) use Mail at work with very few issues. Certainly anytime I have dabbled with Gmail or other 3rd party email clients I have hit issues so just stick to Mail.
Occasionally Mail runs slow but when you consider that Mail stores and interacts with a sometimes vast database of older emails / embedded content etc is it any wonder? Certain server side settings can also affect the way Mail responds even with respect to the way some mail boxes behave, I have found.
However, I have an automator action set up as follows which I run every now and again and this keeps Mail running fast:
Launch Automator and create a new work flow then add a run applescript step, set as follows:
tell application “Mail” to quit
Then add a run shell script action with the following script:
sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index vacuum
And finally add a Launch Application step as follows:
Launch Application Mail
Run this with Mail running, Mail will then quit, it will get cleaned up and then re-opened and will now run as fast as it did on day one. Happy days.
Airmail doesn’t work with cert. Will not work with S/MIME!
There are plugins for Airmail, both for S/MIME and PGP. I haven’t tried them out, but plan to do so tonight and update the blog post accordingly.
NO ENCRYPTION – WORTHLESS.
The only thing that could make me move away from Apple Maill.app is Apple releasing a new mail client.
Cook’s decision not to address the IMAP Mavericks fail indicates he could care less about enterprise clients. Looks like the 15,000 folks relocating to the iHole campus will focus on adding new marginal content streams to apple tv rather than doing anything that will help business customers.
Remember QuickMail? That was an excellent email application. What ever happened to those guys?
Love Mac Mail.
This is not to say that Airmail is any better, that I will leave to those that wish to try or use it now.
As a developer, supporter, manager of massive data bases, I realize that as a ‘creature of habit’ it is best to seek and utilize an ‘others’ experience. For that, I would suggest perusing Pierre Wizia’s comprehensive posting, “Turning Mail.app Into the Best Mac Email App.*” Great suggestions, even for those of us who profess to know everything.
* http://mac.appstorm.net/how-to/internet-howto/turning-mail-app-into-the-best-mac-email-app/
All email clients have their “problems”.
Call Me, we’ll discuss
Here’s the two main problems I’ve found with Apple Mail.
First, PDF attachments get corrupted after you delete the email. After a period of time, I’ll go back to that email in the trash, and the PDF is just one big block of text. Ugh!
Second, one of my email accounts with GoDaddy will not update in Mail from time to time. On iPhone, it’s fine (so it’s not GoDaddy). I either need to quit and restart Mail, or take all accounts offline (then back online) to get that account to refresh. Annoying!
Postbox ever since Apple Mail started getting flaky and loaded with cruft.