[blowski]

Like you, I've tried lots of different mail apps - Mailbox, Sparrow, Airmail. I've enjoyed using Thunderbird, Outlook, Mail. And I've used web interfaces for Gmail, Fastmail, Hotmail, etc.

In the end, which email client I've used has barely made any difference. The key is in processing the emails - forwarding to Evernote for reference, adding to Omnifocus if it's a todo item, replying quickly if I can, or deleting if it's irrelevant.

I found that extra features like tags and snooze just made me more disorganised, instead of less, as I spent more time fiddling with the features and wondering why something had gone wrong.

[jfrisby]

If it were just features, I'd probably agree with you, but Mail.app in particular (doubly so on desktop) seems to have serious issues with syncing of mail, handling of connections when there's non-trivial packet loss, maintaining its internal database consistently/correctly, etc. Some of this may only be an issue if one has many accounts and/or large inboxes but for those of us with, say, an iCloud account, a normal GMail account, and a handful of Google Apps accounts -- and email history stretching back many years -- it's a serious problem.