Your car can have any colour, as long as it is black.
All native email clients are stuck in 2005, lack most basic features, and have bugs not fixed in decades. Also, most providers have poor support for new IMAP features, such as NOTIFY.
Without managesieve (2010, https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5804/ ), any decent filtering is impossible. (And no, it's not supported by almost any email client)
JMAP has already been mentioned.
I also don't remember any email clients supporting carddav.
>not UI
Why not UI? UI is very important. Even such a basic thing as muting folders works like cr*ap in k9mail. Is it better in "fairemail"?
Probably the nothing to install experience. Every Android phone comes with Gmail and every device has a web browser. Do people have to install Gmail on iOS?
I'm using Thunderbird with POP3 accounts, download on my laptop then remove from the server, daily backups. My phone has K9 (the old one with the UI I like) and I never remove messages from the phone. When I send mail from the phone I bcc myself so I can see the message from my laptop later.
Why? Because I don't like to leave my mail forever on somebody's else server. They can lock me out at any time (it will probably never happen) and my mail is mine.
Would I recommend this to anybody? Of course not.
Is it a problem not to have access to all of my mail when I don't have my laptop with me? It never happened to be a problem and it's always less likely to be a problem because of all the messages that are exchanged outside email and on mobile first platforms, even for work.
Thank goodness, Gmail does not come on iOS. No other apps are pre installed except Apple's, and I am always very thankful for that when I set up a Samsung tablet as a kiosk and have to delete sponsored apps, AI apps, Spotify, Microsoft apps, Samsung apps, Google apps, kids apps...horrible experience.
The Apple Mail client works very well with Gmail. The only real negative is that it’s not true push email, though it is largely close enough.
The thing I miss most about macOS now that I’ve gone all-in on Linux is actually Apple Mail. It’s just a simple and clean Mail app.
My current choice is Evolution and I’ve had very good luck with it so far. But ultimately the best Mail experience is on my iPhone.
I was using Thunderbird/BetterBird, but now that a Windows client isn’t a requirement for me anymore, I much prefer Evolution. Thunderbird is a notable pain when it comes to an inability to reliably export/import your user profile to other machines. It’s also such a cluttered application and I find the calendar UI to be horrendous. Good luck using a trackpad to scroll through months of the year.
“Great” isn’t how I would describe it. Searching for “delivery” from my inbox, when the third email in my inbox has a literal subject line of “delivery notification”? Zero results.
It used to break the search index sometimes, but I experienced it twice at most, and it searches instantly for me, never failed to find an e-mail I was looking for...
...from 5 accounts with at least a decade of history each, incl. my office e-mail.
The problem is the actual architecture Apple uses for search in iOS and macOS. Spotlight powers all of it, and it applications like Mail that need search, do so by donating data to spotlight for indexing.
But that means any spotlight bug is a mail search bug, and a settings search bug, and a “just launch this app” search bug, etc etc etc.
It also means that any bugs caused by one of these applications end up affecting them all. So if Contacts causes an indexer crash, none of your searches anywhere work any more. It’s a super fragile architecture. They did some work to split some of the plugins into separate processes but somehow it always ends up being insufficient.
At least on macOS there are some commands to blow away your spotlight index when it goes bad. On iOS you’re basically screwed unless you wipe and restore the OS.
This is obviously better, but until just now it never occurred to me that this would be the way iOS users would engage with gmail, since I've only ever used Android. I always thought the iOS built-in email app was just for Apple mail or something.
IMAP usually means that mail is stored on the provider server even if one can download and delete. Furthermore POP3 is a trivial protocol that could be operated via telnet before everybody went TLS.
The real reason I'm still using POP3 is that I'm using the mailboxes that are bundled with my domains. One on the registrars announced IMAP support a few days ago. All the others are still on POP3 probably because POP3 servers have been available since forever.
It's also IMAP is an awful protocol with so many glaring issues its impossible for a modern client to paper over them. Fastmail invented JMAP but it doesn't seem to have taken off with any other providers.
From memory, there are no bulk actions, so if you want to say select all emails and delete you have to send thousands of requests. If you want to rename a folder you have to send a request for every email in the folder. There is no way to set up filters that run server side, there is no way to get push notifications.
And probably a million other things that don’t hold up today.
Sending those thousands of requests is something your mail client does for you. Deleting 5000 emails takes a few minutes, but how often do you do that? I can select a bunch of emails in Thunderbird and just do stuff with it just fine.
For server side filters I just set them up in Fastmail using the web UI. That's the type of action I do once or twice a year, so totally OK to hop on over to the web app for just that.
I have no idea what you mean by 'push notifications'. I have Thunderbird open on my desktop, and it shows me when there is email. I have K9 on my smartphone, and it shows me when there is email (I don't have it set up to display notifications, but that seems possible). That's basically all I need to do email.
Thunderbird is great. I’ve been using it a long time, too, and feature-wise, I think Thunderbird is way ahead. I just find Mailspring a bit more... pleasant to use? And I think it’ll be an easier switch for people coming off Gmail Web, which is why I’m recommending it.
(Also... Thunderbird is not that different from an Electron app itself. It uses Gecko instead of Blink, and has a few bits of XUL here and there, but the core premise is the same. Though it doesn’t use React at least!)
> I would go further and ask what do electron apps offer in the way of improvements that WebApps don't.
If there was a way to run Mailspring on the web, I’d switch in a minute! I’ve tried to port it one time, but it got a bit tricky.
Mailspring uses a native module for syncing the mail, which would have to run either on a server somewhere or in a web worker. I think the web worker makes more sense nowadays, and would make it an offline-first app, but there’s a catch: how do you connect to IMAP/SMTP from a web browser?
Running the sync engine on a server is possible, but you have to have a server. It could make sense, though, if you’re running your own email server and want a killer webmail app to go with it.
The amount of configuration required to rival what's available out of the box in Web clients (especially indexing, searching, filtering, blocking, etc.) is a bit too much for someone who isn't already interested in it. I tried GNUS in Emacs and a few TUI apps; I do like having all my emails accessible locally, but for day-to-day use, web clients are more convenient. I haven't tried Thunderbird or Outlook (if it still has a local version), though, so maybe I'd have all the conveniences I want there - but since I already have them in Fastmail, I just don't have an incentive to switch.
I find myself using the web UI because it's much faster than MacOS Mail, which often gets a bit stuck when downloading new emails via IMAP. I'd prefer to use a native app, but it happened without me thinking - I just ended up going for the fastest option unconsciously.
Try Thunderbird. It's easy to set up IMAP to gmail, and it's very quick. Keep what you want on the server (or download and delete) and just never look at the web client again.
I wanted to use Thunderbird, but there is no Thunderbird for iOS (well, there is one in development, you can install it through TestFlight, but didn't work at all the last time I tried it). I try to use the same apps everywhere to have some consistency.
macOS mail app is a special type of terrible especially if you deal with multiple email accounts. Every os upgrade causes various bugs such as search index all of the sudden not working and you have to reset and reimport all your mailboxes
I agree. Mail.app is one of the buggiest pieces of software I have ever used. It has some nice features as well, especially the editor. But some of the bugs I have experienced were catastrophic, such as silently failing exports that appeared to have completed successfully (this was recently fixed after years).
I've used Mail.app since 2004 and have not had any of those problems except searching using Spotlight have occasionally been broken over the years, but never searching within the app.
And I've had both multiple accounts various servers both private and work. And dozens of work-related role aliases which Mail.app correctly always used when replying. No problems there. Neither I have had to rebuild sqlite mail folder db, but did have some quirks first when work emails were transferred to Office365 which wanted to rename folders etc. nuisance, 2FA worked also worked fine since IIRC Mojave. I've had some addons MacGPG, sorting and maintenance scripts too. MacGPG does need some attention when upgrading though besides paying for subscription it moved time ago.
I've used also Thunderbird, mostly with linux. And used and tested whole lot of various clients since Elm was a thing -80's, then Pine, mutt etc.
The macOS Mail.app is fast reliable in my opinion, but sure there are things in its UX it could be yet improved. But still it's been long time among best and never broken or let me down over 20 years, both work and private use.
Well I usually already have my browser open, and "Ctrl+T, 'fa', [enter]" loads up my email basically instantly. I don't want email notifications (or any notifications, really) so a local app just seems like it would introduce a lot of clunk for not much benefit.
The comment I was replying to was wondering why people installed apps to read email instead of using the browser based clients. So I don't understand your point ...?
To be clear, a "Web UI" usually refers to a desktop or mobile application whose user-interface is built with web technology (HTML, CSS, JS etc.) that is rendered using a webview component in the application. You don't refer to a website (even if it is a web-based application like GMail) as "Web UI". It is still called a website. And while you are right that browsers today can store data for offline use, nobody considers it good enough for a backup.
This is the way. Use a tui client like alpine or mutt, and enjoy managing 100s of thousands of emails in ms. I feel physical pain when I have to see colleagues and acquaintances wait for several seconds in their heavy web interfaces. I can manipulate batches of emails with terminal tools and the power of Maildir.
Your car can have any colour, as long as it is black.
All native email clients are stuck in 2005, lack most basic features, and have bugs not fixed in decades. Also, most providers have poor support for new IMAP features, such as NOTIFY.