Best email client for Mac? (Thunderbird problems!)

JayceyF said:

Hello to all from a newbie here.

I'm needing some email advice. When I got this machine a while ago, I was advised not to use the Mail app - wise decision, it lost things, and just behaved erratically.

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I've been using it for 5 years, never had a problem.

JayceyF said:

Hello to all from a newbie here.

I'm needing some email advice. When I got this machine a while ago, I was advised not to use the Mail app - wise decision, it lost things, and just behaved erratically.

I was then pointed in the direction of Thunderbird, which has been serving me well - until yesterday. After weeks of satisfactory use, it's suddenly giving me "Unable to connect to your IMAP server. You may have exceeded the maximum number of connections to this server. If so, use the Advanced IMAP Server Settings dialog to reduce the number of cached connections.". I've trawled through forum after forum, and done everything suggested (the main suggestion being to change the "Maximum number of server connections to cache" to 1). It sends fine, but doesn't receive - the exception being as described below.

I've got 10 email accounts running on there - only two are IMAP and the rest are POP, but the IMAP ones are the important ones. But this problem seems to affect the POP ones too, despite the error message. All are Hotmail/Live accounts apart from one IMAP one, which is Gmail - Thunderbird receives the Gmail mail OK, but not the Hotmail. So could this be a Hotmail problem?

After briefly considering Entourage (which I have in my Office 2008 Suite), I decided that was too old and creaky, and not really up to the job.

After trials and errors with other free email systems (including a horror called Inky), I've ended up with Opera Mail, which is at least allowing me to load my accounts & is receiving my mail - although it's rather odd-looking, and trying to import any address book into it is a total and ridiculous nightmare (they seem stuck in the dark ages regarding contacts).

So I currently have a working solution with which I can use my accounts without having to log into online Outlook every time. However, what I'd REALLY like to do is to 'mend' Thunderbird once and for all, receive my mail into there, and get rid of that silly message. Does anyone have any useful suggestions, please?

(Note - this only started happening after I updated my OS X, which may have nothing to do with it, but I just thought it might be worth mentioning?)

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Airmail
I've used mail.app, thunderbird and more recently Airmail ($2 in Mac app store). I find that airmail crashes a lot but it does get around issues I had with mail.app. I keep both in my dock but I use airmail a lot more than I use mail.app. I keep my inbox small on the main account I wish to reply from. Having tens of thousands of emails in my inbox (in my main archive account) simply overwhelms both mail.app and airmail so I never leave it sitting with those inboxes active. I like IMAP a LOT better than POP but I have found that POP accounts tend to use fewer resources on the client end.

Outlook?
I don't recommend entourage or outlook or anything else from Microsoft. This is mainly out of personal preference and mediocre experience with MS products on OSX. For instance, I picked up Office 2011 for $10 through our company "home use" program. I installed it for my wife in addition to iWork and LibreOffice. It gave us nothing but headaches from activation to conflicts with LibreOffice to Windows-like behaviors like stealing file associations away from other programs. When her Mac crashed, I "forgot" to reinstall MS Office and she hasn't "remembered" to ask me. The MS DVD is downstairs in the basement next to the 78 rpm records and buggy whips where it belongs.

Webmail
Sadly Thunderbird is not (very) actively maintained. When I'm really hard up, I use webmail through one of the big providers, either gmail or outlook.com. I prefer not to go anywhere near the snake pit that is yahoo. I have an account there that languishes in neglect. I guess for me the issue is the bad experience my cousin had. Att uses yahoo for their customer email if you use dsl. Her email was hacked repeatedly and both Att and Yahoo were astoundingly clueless in everything from account recovery to account setup and protection. I doubt they even have basic 2-factor login set up. You really don't want to do business with any provider that is too dumb to offer rudimentary features like 2-factor login unless you have no choice.

Tumbleweed666 said:

I've been using it for 5 years, never had a problem.

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mail.app limitations
I've become frustrated with the "dumbing down" of settings in mail.app. Tossing me out to System Preferences to pick email accounts is not only clunky but disruptive to the way I prefer to do things. Not only that, mail.app INSISTS that the from address matches the login used to retrieve email. This flies in the face of using a single gmail or other inbox as an "aggregator" and prevents me from replying to an email as the person to whom it was addressed rather than the login of the account I happen to be using at the time.

hosted exchange workaround
To get around this, I have set up a hosted exchange account so that the login matches the email I wish to reply as. This was a huge waste of my time to get around a limitation that has no place on a desktop email client like mail.app. I could use my AppleCare to get Apple involved with this but they are rather hardheaded and I don't have time to teach them how to do email properly so I just live with it. Maybe I'll find the time to lodge a complaint on Apple's feedback page...

Can you actually get online at all? Browsing, for example?

Entourage/Outlook for me. Solid, reliable and feature complete. But you'll need a copy of Office.

Once you get up and running again, check our mailmate, probably the best power user client right now. It handles large mail archives fine etc too.

I use mailplane. I have all three accounts open in three tabs. notifications in my menubar for all three accounts. And no icon in my dock. $25 well spent. all the others I tried failed me in one way or another.

PicnicTutorials said:

I use mailplane. I have all three accounts open in three tabs. notifications in my menubar for all three accounts. And no icon in my dock. $25 well spent. all the others I tried failed me in one way or another.

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Sorry I can't take mailplane seriously. It only works with gmail and while it has some nice features, it has no offline mode. No offline mode? While mailplane gets around some of the multi-account login limitations of Chrome, it's missing the all important ability to work offline.

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JayceyF said:

I've partly solved my problem! In order to get Airmail up and running, Airmail Support told me to set up 'two step verification'. This thing is an abomination - it screwed all my email accounts everywhere (iPhone and iPad included), and only by researching this into the early hours did I realise what the problem was, and I've now turned it off. Good riddance! (And Airmail still doesn't work, and probably never will! But that's another story.)

However, I'm now back with my original problems (albeit slightly altered), as follows:-

• Thunderbird - the Gmail IMAP now works, but none of the POP ones, and I still can't re-add the IMAP Hotmail account (next plan - delete the POPs and try re-adding as IMAPs)
• Mail - deleted the POP accounts but the IMAP ones still don't work (next plan - as above)
• Opera Mail - the only thing that's now working with all accounts (and currently saving my life, despite its limitations!)
• Airmail - forget it, a dead duck and a waste of $2.

I'll report back on my progress, just in case anyone is following this sorry saga.

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Two step is a must these days, if you can get it working. Outlook.com and gmail.com offer decent 2 step authentication. gmail offers the ability to use app passwords but I have found they don't always "just work." Sorry to hear you are having so much trouble but email really is "rocket science". It shouldn't be but it is. We have spammers to thank. We have Apple and the rapidly increasing dumbdownedness of mail.app to thank. We have providers like gmail that don't really follow IMAP standards to thank. And we have hackers that force all these convoluted security measures to thank. No wonder most teenagers simply use text messages and ignore email. I don't blame them.

Tumbleweed666 said:

I've been using it for 5 years, never had a problem.

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Me too, and I've never seen that message ever. Maybe move off all the saved email and remove Thunderbird, using search to ensure it's fully deleted. Then re-install it...there was an update last week but I've found it to be rock solid and it's way better than Apple Mail which I would never return to now.

JayceyF said:

It looks great - but $50?!

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give the trial a go for 30 days and see what you think. I thought the same when I started.....by 14 days I was starting to see value, at 31 days it was a no brainer.

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JayceyF said:

I'm now realising that my problems are deeper than just email clients - my Internet accounts aren't working properly at all. Every time I delete and reload one, the IMAP/SSL testing fails and they get rejected. I'm also getting lots of these messages in my Console:-

com.apple.preferences.internetaccounts.remoteservice:
MailIAPlugin: Tried to get setting for nonexistent account with uid ....... (pile of numbers)

There's clearly a connection here. Is this something to do with certificates?

HELP! I'm now drowning in unfamiliar waters, and I don't want to mess up my machine (which I only bought in December!). Does ANYBODY know what any of this means, and how I can fix it?

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Sorry to hear you are having further problems. I don't know what may cause this issue but it sounds like something may have gone wrong during the upgrade. Do you have a backup pre-upgrade you can go back to in order to retry the upgrade, or alternatively, have you considered doing a clean install? Sometimes quicker to start afresh than trouble shoot. Just a thought.

I am a huge fan of sparrow, I have been using it since the day that I got my first mac. I have 17 email accounts so having a combined inbox and great interface is important to me.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sparrow/id417250177?mt=12

I would recommend this program to everyone.

Nobody Reads This Line

JayceyF said:

I was then pointed in the direction of Thunderbird, which has been serving me well - until yesterday. After weeks of satisfactory use, it's suddenly giving me "Unable to connect to your IMAP server. You may have exceeded the maximum number of connections to this server. If so, use the Advanced IMAP Server Settings dialog to reduce the number of cached connections.".

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I know what you mean. I installed Thunderbird a few weeks ago for my IMAP account, and I sometimes get that message. Another occasional message is something about not being able to copy (to my trash?) after I delete a few emails. Deleting them again usually takes care of it.

roadbloc said:

Entourage/Outlook for me. Solid, reliable and feature complete. But you'll need a copy of Office.

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Or an email host that provides Outlook as part of the service plan. That's how I got it.

I had almost no complaints about Outlook 2011 until a few weeks ago, when I stated getting endless error messages about not being able to connect to the server even though mail came in fine. So I gave Thunderbird a shot. I like it except for:

1) There's no way to read the date, time and dial-in info when someone sends a meeting request unless they've copied it into the subject line.

2) There's no way to increase and then lock in the font size for the viewing pane. Even on a 21" display, it's a chore to scan names, subjects, etc.

3) There only way to have remote content automatically loaded on all emails is to add those senders to my address book. But I don't want every newsletter, etc. in my address book. I found a January 2014 tutorial on YouTube that shows how to configure TB to load remote content on all emails, but the settings in the video don't match what I have.

4) The search tool is a chore. I don't want a tab of results where I have to keep hitting the More button. Maybe there's a setting that will let me display search results the way that Outlook does, but I haven't found it yet.

So I have to make a choice: Accept those drawbacks as the price paid for not having to deal with Outlook's error messages and slow syncing, or bite the bullet and go back to Outlook.