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Ask HN: Best developer friendly email client for macOS?

2 points by fsto ↗ HN
Help the developer community and suggest an email client for MacOS that truly is the best according to you.

It feels like no developers I know is particularly happy with their (GUI) email client on MacOS.

I'm looking for one that:

  - Stays out of my way and lets me focus on emails.
  - Easy to use without a mouse
  - Minimal amount of clutter
  - Unifies Gmail / Google inboxes and sent emails
  - Doesn't cache every single email on my hard drive
  - Probably more, but you get where I'm going
Clients I've tried extensively:

  - Spark - By far the best I've tried so far. But, and it hurts... I choose not to use them now that Ukraine is being invaded both geographically and digitally. In this case I'm rather safe than sorry.
  - Apple Mail - it works, but sparks absolute zero joy.
  - Twobird - I wish I loved them and I do in 80% of the cases. But they want to merge your todo list and email and as a consequence they don't allow you to archive an email without clicking - two times. There are other similar examples caused by the fact that they really want to be a mix between a todo list and an email client.
  - Airmail - "Apple Design Award 2017 Winner". 2017.
  - Mailbox - Discontinued after Dropbox acquired them.

7 comments

[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 26.3 ms ] thread
mikebos
You could try Mailmate (https://freron.com), I think it ticks all your boxes. The stable is old, the beta is located at https://updates.mailmate-app.com/2.0/archives/
Normille
I ditched Thunderbird for Mailmate last year, after getting frustrated with just how slow and clunky Thunderbird was, so much of the time.

I really wanted to like Mailmate. It does tick a lot of boxes. But it's expensive and I found it to be too glitchy to justify that kind of price. It would often error out on all my accounts, throwing up endless dialogues, telling me that there was no password stored in the keychain for each account [not true!] an issue that's been reported several times over the years and never been fixed. Similarly, when sending messages, I'd often see similar errors and the message would end up in both my Sent and Drafts folders. So I was never quite sure whether it had actually gone or not. And having to re-send lots of emails with a "Sorry if you get this twice, but..." disclaimer at the top soon got boring.

I'm now back on Thunderbird and, while it still looks like something from the 1990s, it does seem a bit less sluggish than I remember. Maybe Mozilla are finally getting their act together?

   >>Spark - By far the best I've tried so far. But, and it hurts... I choose not to use them now that Ukraine is being invaded both geographically and digitally. In this case I'm rather safe than sorry.
EDIT: I don't get the connection between stopping using Spark and Ukraine being invaded?

I looked at Spark a while back too. It was the fact it's 'rent-a-software' which put me off going there.

fsto
@Normille, thanks for sharing! I may give Thunderbird another shot then. Regarding Spark; it’s owned by Readdle which is a Kiev, Ukraine based company whose users supposedly are not affected by the invasion. I just personally feel uncomfortable using them, but wish them the best of luck! https://readdle.com/blog/readdle-on-ukraine
vpaulus
I recently used Spike (https://www.spikenow.com/), both desktop and mobile app. The I switched to Spark. Its probably not easy without mouse. And I also did not like the function that they automatically includes a tracking pixel to the mails. Anyways you may take a look.

BTW for private mails I use paid version of Tutanota with own domain, because of privacy aspects.

fsto
Interesting! What made you switch from Spike to Spark?
vpaulus
That tracking pixel thing. (Actually this even has benefits: it is used for a delivered/read status tracking.) And when our team-mates started using Spark, I found their UI more clear, than Spike. I have nothing else against Spike.
fsto
Makes sense!