native mail app vs sparrow vs postbox

[anthony11]

I wish there were a way to just show the most recent 50 messages like Mail.app for the iPhone.

I'm puzzled. Set it to sort by received or sent time, and only scroll up to older messages when needed.

If you synch with Gmail, how do you handle the duplicate messages? E.g. one msg in the Inbox, dup in All Mail, another dup in the Family folder.

I'm not sure what you mean by "synch with Gmail". One of the mailboxes I currently access via IMAP is hosted by Gmail, but I'm puzzled by your use of "synch".

As for All Mail -- if you don't use it (I sure don't), then ignore it. Or better yet unsubscribe from it. When I moved my personal domain to Gmail I initially would periodically just 'delete' everything in All Mail to clear out space on my MBP's disk, but then doing so became really, really flaky -- the other end would freeze, or bomb out halfway through. So I just unsubscribed from it.

Whatever your Family folder is, I don't have one.

For personal email I don't care as I generally sent plaintext email anyway. For business email it just looks unprofessional.

HUH? How do you figure that a message body in magenta Comic Sans is "professional"? Sending someone a friggin' MS Word document -- now THAT is unprofessional, but trying to educate the perps (which I've tried) is like pounding sand down a rat hole (which I've also done). There are occasions when I'll go rich text (alas, not the MIME standard, but probably dumbass HTML) to cast a block of pasted text in a fixed-width font when I know that the recipient can view it properly, but there are a number of people and processes in our company that would be annoyed by needless encoding.

First, labels are treated as folders in Mail, so you cannot add multiple labels to a single email.

I've never wanted to, but clearly YMMV.

That's just one thing, not to mention the strange folders Mail.app automatically creates as labels in your Gmail like "[Gmail] Archive" or stuff like that. I really hate not to be able to "archive" and "delete" properly on Mail.

Complain to Gmail or find a more traditional provider. Gmail's IMAP is an interface to their nontraditional mail system. I personally find it a bit annoying and wish it would just act traditionally, but Google probably figures that the best approach is to provide an experience as close to their web mail interface as possible for Jane User (like my wife) who has *only* ever used email via a web interface. When people ask to use a computer at my home to check their email, and I ask them if they just need a web browser, or what, I invariably get a reaction along the above lines -- people have no idea that there's any other way to do it.

I'm not sure what you mean by "archive" "properly", but delete works well enough if you ignore the [All Mail] thing. If you don't like the smart-folder-like things from Gmail, unsubscribe from them and you won't have to look at them.

 

[OnlyShawn]

I spent some time today working to get gmail integrated wonderfully with mail.app, following this: Setting up Apple Mail to Rock and Roll with Gmail

for all you people worried about the [gmail]archive nonsense, etc...this WILL FIX THAT and give you a nice, clean sidebar. Basically, there are ways to make gmail behave like a traditional mail service, and with the imap settings that are now integrated into your account, you're good to go and can make it all sing.

I followed the steps on above site, made sure that my non-gmail addresses were all using the same mailboxes for sent/trash/spam/drafts on mail.app and on my iphone, and now my sidebar with the mailboxes is all nice and wonderfully clean. Pretty sweet.

 

[aaagat111]

I am writing here because I am trying to find an app that works. Lately the mail app has just not been sending and receiving efficiently. I am required to go to the actual web site ( work, yahoo, gmail as the case may be) to actually send mail


I am looking for a solution.

You are clearly doing something wrong if you can't even send and receive mail on a regular basis. That doesn't seem like a software issue or bug. I've been using Mac Mail for 8+ years, and I have never had a problem connecting to mail servers, given that the connection details were correct and my internet connection was not interrupted.

 

[stisdal]

I spent some time today working to get gmail integrated wonderfully with mail.app, following this: Setting up Apple Mail to Rock and Roll with Gmail

for all you people worried about the [gmail]archive nonsense, etc...this WILL FIX THAT and give you a nice, clean sidebar. Basically, there are ways to make gmail behave like a traditional mail service, and with the imap settings that are now integrated into your account, you're good to go and can make it all sing.

I followed the steps on above site, made sure that my non-gmail addresses were all using the same mailboxes for sent/trash/spam/drafts on mail.app and on my iphone, and now my sidebar with the mailboxes is all nice and wonderfully clean. Pretty sweet.

Thank you for that link, I just tried it and it cleaned everything up for my Gmail accounts. Looks perfect now!

Edit: I voted for the stock email app as I find it to be the most blended and intuitive. I have tried Sparrow and Thunderbird, but always go back to mail....

 

[jojoba]

I spent some time today working to get gmail integrated wonderfully with mail.app, following this: Setting up Apple Mail to Rock and Roll with Gmail

for all you people worried about the [gmail]archive nonsense, etc...this WILL FIX THAT and give you a nice, clean sidebar. Basically, there are ways to make gmail behave like a traditional mail service, and with the imap settings that are now integrated into your account, you're good to go and can make it all sing.

I followed the steps on above site, made sure that my non-gmail addresses were all using the same mailboxes for sent/trash/spam/drafts on mail.app and on my iphone, and now my sidebar with the mailboxes is all nice and wonderfully clean. Pretty sweet.

Thanks for posting that!

 

[amityweb]

I thought Sparrow was too simple. But thats gone now Google have bought them out.

Mail.app seems to have issues with my massive GMail account, status never shows so I dont know what its doing, and then the Archive/Delete issue I cant fix.

Postbox seems to be like Mail.app but works better with GMail. I have that working OK now. BUT, Postbox do not provide support. In fact I cannot find any support, not even a forum, about it. I have some issues/questions and they basically said look at the self help section (which did not answer my questions). So although it works better with GMail I am going to keep trying Mail.app because you cant sell a product and not provide support. I guess they want to sell to a basic user market and not business or advanced/techies who need to do a few more advanced things.

Thunderbird - I also read thats going too. Possibly still a rumour, could not find official news about that from Mozilla. The current version is likely to be available but no more development is what i understand?

Then you have Outlook, which due to the above issues I though I may have to use, but then its part of the Office suite which I dont need.

So in my opinion there are NO "very good" email applications. Postbox is good for the average user, but if you are more advanced or a business I would not recommend it due to no support. Mail.app is probably better for the more techies and business due to a better support community and Applescript integration, but not great with Gmail. Sparrow and Thunderbird are on the way out. Outlook is too expensive.

P.S. there is always web interfaces, but I dont recommend them either from a productivity point of view, you cant customise them or integrate with other applications (e.g. I want to check email twice a day, but GMail pop ups instantly, I get nothing done!).

 

[jojoba]

I thought Sparrow was too simple. But thats gone now Google have bought them out.

Mail.app seems to have issues with my massive GMail account, status never shows so I dont know what its doing, and then the Archive/Delete issue I cant fix.

Postbox seems to be like Mail.app but works better with GMail. I have that working OK now. BUT, Postbox do not provide support. In fact I cannot find any support, not even a forum, about it. I have some issues/questions and they basically said look at the self help section (which did not answer my questions). So although it works better with GMail I am going to keep trying Mail.app because you cant sell a product and not provide support. I guess they want to sell to a basic user market and not business or advanced/techies who need to do a few more advanced things.

Thunderbird - I also read thats going too. Possibly still a rumour, could not find official news about that from Mozilla. The current version is likely to be available but no more development is what i understand?

Then you have Outlook, which due to the above issues I though I may have to use, but then its part of the Office suite which I dont need.

So in my opinion there are NO "very good" email applications. Postbox is good for the average user, but if you are more advanced or a business I would not recommend it due to no support. Mail.app is probably better for the more techies and business due to a better support community and Applescript integration, but not great with Gmail. Sparrow and Thunderbird are on the way out. Outlook is too expensive.

P.S. there is always web interfaces, but I dont recommend them either from a productivity point of view, you cant customise them or integrate with other applications (e.g. I want to check email twice a day, but GMail pop ups instantly, I get nothing done!).

Oh no, Thunderbird is going as well? I'm comfortably settled with Sparrow and Thunderbird now. If they mess with either I'll be hugely disappointed

 

[s00nertp]

Postbox

I was looking or a mail app to use for "work emails" on my Mac and first tried the stock app. It seemed to crash too much and did not have the conversation feature that I liked with "Sparrow".

For disclosure: I have the paid version of Sparrow and Postbox.

Sparrow:
I then tried Sparrow, which is really smooth, intuitive and has a great conversation view that I love. Unfortunately it was also too unstable and it caused me to see duplicate messages due to how it tracks them. The last issue was the dealbreaker as I use this for work and need to know with absolute certainty what the status of my mail is, the fake duplicates were driving me insane & happened a couple times a day. We use corporate gmail so it isn't like I was using some crazy service.
In addition, Sparrow seems to hang when I add all my accounts, as if I had too many mail messages. I wish there was a way to throttle down & get only the last 500, 1k or something from each account. (I sent a feature request for this). If they fixed this, I'd use it for my personal (non-work) email that is less important.

Postbox:
I then started looking for something else and came to "Postbox". Postbox is not as cool looking as Sparrow, but it is rock solid stable, awesome for searching, and has good customizations to see what I want. I have a few gmail accounts and it has only crashed 2 times in the past 8 months. Mail would crash almost daily for me, Sparrow a little less. Email is extremely important to me, so I see my email client almost like a business partner; Postbox is worth every penny, I'd be willing to pay twice the price for it.

In summary:
Postbox is what I recommend to anyone who wants a robust app, the conversation view, and great searching.


(To the user who complained about Postbox support: I have sent them 3 requests for help for standard configuration type stuff & they have always gotten back to me quickly. I dont remember how I did it offhand, but it was easy.)

 

[DoctorCrap]

I use Mail.
I have never heard of Postbox. I am going to try it out soon.
I have used Sparrow, nothing worked so I was the heck with that.
I accidentally submitted Postbox instead of my default Mail.

 

[Mr. McMac]

I use the paid version of Postbox (with Lightning and Provider for Google Calendar Add-On's) on my Macs and PC's. I like it much better than the native mail app. Never tried Sparrow, and I haven't used Thunderbird in years so I can't comment on those

 

[dagamer34]

Sparrow for Gmail, Apple Mail for school email (Exchange-based).

 

[Dolorian]

I prefer Sparrow.

 

[resting]

ok, i've tried sparrow and postbox concurrently to compare between the two.

i prefer postbox for its superb summary view.

it is able to gather all mails with the same subject title and represent them in conversational view.
sparrow has that too, but some how it misses a few mails. i'm not sure why.

postbox's message view looks more compact too.

however, i'm having trouble with its notification. it only notifies where there's a new mail. subsequent mails with the same subjects, will not be notified, unless you have read the previous one before.

what i would like to have is for it to notify every single mail. so i don't have to respond immediately to those that doesn't concern me.

have been trying to search for help. but their support doesn't document this, nor is there anyway i could reach out to them for help. thats a big minus.

anyone knows how to contact their team for help?

it seems they are worried about negative comments and shutting down all means of public support.