| I am mostly happy with Postbox (commercial Thunderbird fork) and I'm unlikely to switch, but I will consider a premium cross-platform email client. Things that come to mind: * Reliability is crucial. I love Postbox, but version 4 is hanging a lot on El Capitan. Email is the last program I want to have to Force Quit. It has to be rock solid and easy for me to import/export my mail. * Search is also crucial - I have my entire 20 year email archive (minus spam) on my laptop! Fast search is good, but search also needs to reliable. It's more important that it ultimately finds the email I want. Postbox also has a problem where as soon as I index an email folder, it tells me the folder needs to be reindexed. * Email for me is all about filters & prioritization. I have hundreds of rules that scan my email before I ever read it and assign a priority to the email. Sometimes I have to manually tweak the priority if the rules were slightly wrong, and the client should memorize that. My inbox should be sorted in priority, as if an assistant has already gone through, got rid of the junk and determined which are most important and the order I should do them in. * Keyboard shortcuts are a huge win. Having 'a' for archive and 'v' for file (and a pop-up window where I can type & search for the folder to file an email into)... it sounds like a tiny thing, but it was a huge win for my productivity when Postbox copied that from Gmail. * I don't need calendar integration, I'll use a separate calendar app for that. * While I don't need support, it would be nice to at least have somewhere to report bugs. Postbox lowered their price & discontinued support, and now I can't find where to report the problems or have a sense of if they'll be fixed. I want the opposite of what Postbox did: increase the price & give a premium experience & powerful, luxury product. * I still use POP3. I know I'm crazy, but it feels good to not have all my email stored on a server. Email is mission critical for me. I basically run my entire business through it. I'm happy to pay for it - in fact, I'm waiting for someone to get serious and charge $100 for their premium email client with annual upgrades. MS Office is $100/year, Photoshop is $120/year, and yet email is more important to me than both of those programs. |