Another blog about my latest journey to find a mailclient for Apple’s OS X (Yosemite) which would work the way I want. I’m working for many years according to the “Inbox Zero” principle. Basically, keep your Inbox empty. Everything in the Inbox is something ‘to do’. This works beautiful for me, even with my > 6GB IMAP-mailbox where all my e-mail is stored. Archive what needs to be archived, delete mail which is not required to have (usually spam or server messages).
So, as you can imagine my mailclient should work fast and I love keybindings. Mail clients like Outlook used to be okay-ish for me, until I started to work with the Inbox Zero. Clicking, dragging and stuff wasn’t my thing. Plus Microsoft seems to have issues creating a reasonable search within e-mail. In short, searching sucked. Also the fact I started to use Linux as my desktop OS where I had to use WINE to start Outlook wasn’t working in Microsoft’s advantage to become my mail client. So, I started with several mail clients under Linux. From Evolution, Kmail to eventually Thunderbird. Up till last year, this was my preferred mail client.
Why change a winning concept you may think? Thunderbird works under Mac as good as under Linux (or Microsoft Windows if you please). Well, Thunderbird isn’t a nice looking client and you can fix that with themes, true.. but the worst part, it’s SOOOO slow, especially when using multiple (huge) IMAP-boxes . Even on my late 2013 Macbook Air (8GB RAM) it was just slow. When it was started, it was fine. Cleaning caches and not downloading all messages helped a bit, but still .. Also, since I tried out Apple Mail I got a big fan of the “Conversations” which Apple Mail has implemented very nice. Yes, there’s a plugin for that (Conversation) like there’s probably a plugin for everything. Though this particular plugin was really buggy and I had to switch back to ‘show in normal reader’ too much just to see attachments. So, time for a new mailclient.
Apple Mail is nice but has one major disadvantage. It doesn’t support multiple identities. I want to mail from “Bart” and in some other cases from “ZipZap Entertainment”. Apple Mail doesn’t do this if all mail comes into the same IMAP mailbox. On top of this, Apple Mail is even worse with big IMAP mailboxes.
Then I found this relatively new client “Mailbox“. This feels (and probably is) made for the “Inbox Zero” concept. Native support for Conversations and feels like a real Apple product. Biggest disadvantage, no IMAP support (what?). They only support iCloud (which I couldn’t get working) or Gmail. Pity.. Such a nice client with such big miss.
My quest continued and after some searching I found PostBox. Basically the speed and layout of Apple Mail with all the advantages of Thunderbird (multiple identities, signature support etc). After the 30 day trial I got addicted to this nifty piece of software. This actually makes my life (or my todo-list) easier. I can move messages to the correct archive automatically or manually using keyboard only. Really great piece of software and very fast. It literally has everything I want in a mail-client.
So, here’s the free commercial for them. They deserve it. It’s well worth the money and I bought it today (with 2 days left for trial). Yay Postbox!