
Email Apps Suck - schneidmaster
https://schneid.io/blog/why-your-email-app-sucks.html
======
616c
I will not beat a dead horse with my "mutt is superior because they know the
best they cannot do is suck without confessing it" trope, but almost all email
clients lack is Maildir.

Even if you are not a technical user, you should respect the fact that
proprietary formats will bite you. Look how many this guy alone used. If you
use opensource, even, the mbox and mh all email, one giant file paradigm is
all nice until it is corrupted.

I wish more clients respected Maildir underneath, or tried to bend the truth
on Windows FAT32 and NTFS ad the ; in path names limitation is a pain.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maildir#Filesystem_Compatibili...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maildir#Filesystem_Compatibility_Issues)

Sadly even Thunderbird has struggled to re-engineer a Maildir subsystem where
it was never intended. Show me any email client devs who had the khutzpah to
even dare that.

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=845952](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=845952)

But you have a lot of safety in spreading it across files, and you can throw
dumber full text search at it, shell scripts, and a lot more flexibility over
all.

Sadly, some Unixisms will never escape Unix culture. As someone who has
watched people screw 10+ years of email in Thunderbird n>1 times, I wish for
the love of God everyone would use Maildir in the client, regardless of
interface, free or not, et cetera.

~~~
ksk
I don't agree with you. Like with anything else, less abstraction = more
performance. Creating a specific/targeted way to index, store and manage email
data has its benefits too.

I'd hazard a guess that most proprietary formats are similar to the maildir
format. Its just that the individual files are opqaue at the filesystem level.
If you create thousands of tiny files then you are hoping that the file system
design - which like any other design can only be optimized for specific
workloads - can handle it better than a database type format specifically
designed for email.

Then again a generic full text search system (which probably won't even know
that they're email files) over those thousands of files would have to be
better than a targeted design for email data.

You would miss certain optimizations like.. (making one up now) extracting and
storing just the email headers in a separate region to speed up indexing and
having some indirection built in to lookup that specific email.

~~~
nine_k
If a filesystem is a poor match for an email database, I'd appreciate the use
of a well-established, open, and documented database format. That is, a format
not only your unique email client can understand. Something with an
independent manipulation tool. In the perfect case, something that can be
interoperably used by several different email clients (not in parallel, of
course) and / or third-party indexing / filtering / other processing tools.

SQLite is used in many cases to store smaller things. It's likely not a good
fit for a few gigabytes of email with binary attachments, though. I wonder
what would be? NoSQL document-storing databases seem to have been created for
a purpose like this. Is any of these used by any remotely popular client?

~~~
616c
Again, shoving everything into one file is mbox, which is a recognized file
format (if not database), and it does not help things that much.

I have wondered the Sqlite thing myself beyond my one criticism. If anything,
you would love K9 Mail on Android, which does this out of necessity.

And some people have made SQL and noSQL email stores.

[http://nosql.mypopescu.com/post/3083070885/couchdb-as-
email-...](http://nosql.mypopescu.com/post/3083070885/couchdb-as-email-store)

[https://www.npmjs.com/package/haraka-
nosql](https://www.npmjs.com/package/haraka-nosql)

[http://www.dbmail.org/](http://www.dbmail.org/)

------
captainmuon
No mention of Postbox ([https://www.postbox-inc.com](https://www.postbox-
inc.com))? It's based on Thunderbird, but has very good support for
conversations and archiving (Gmail-like workflow) even for non-Gmail
providers. It also has nice native looking styles for macOS and Windows.

For me, it is one of the best clients... although I use primarily windows and
sometimes Linux (where it works fine with wine), so I can't try the macOS-only
ones.

~~~
616c
As a FLOSS supporter, I have been perturbed they charge money and let
Thunderbird languish, just like I have been as an individual user all these
years. Problem is I don't make a profit off it. Do they give back? I would
like to stand corrected if I arrogantly assumed.

------
dimgl
Mail.app is fine for me... What am I missing in an email client that Mail.app
doesn't provide?

~~~
wilkystyle
From the article:

"[...] it’s buggy and crashy, it needs to update my email library every few
months when I open it (why does my email need a library?), and it lacks any
sort of innovative feature set (or even support for things like snoozing)."

~~~
stephenr
And yet none of us seem to see those issues.

I can remember mail.app needing to rebuild a mailbox to a new format maybe
twice or three times, since probably 2008.

1 person saying "x is buggy and crashes" doesn't mean much without actual
descriptions of the problem.

~~~
schneidmaster
I mean, if you like Mail.app, use Mail.app. I'm not here to tell you that you
should change how you read your email if you're satisfied with it. I was pithy
in the Mail.app section because the article was already shaping up to be quite
long and I just sort of assume everyone in the Apple ecosystem has used
Mail.app at least a bit and knows its strengths and shortcomings already.

~~~
stephenr
> knows its strengths and shortcomings already.

I've used mail.app since I've used OS X, and I wouldn't describe any version
I've used as particularly "buggy" or "crashy"

------
charlesz
For what it's worth, I have been using Outlook for Mac for about a year now
and have really enjoyed it. Categorizing emails by folder is, well, what
Outlook has always done well and search is surprisingly good.

Maybe I'm the odd one out, but I don't need any glitz and glam in my email
client. I just want it to work and show me the email I want to see when I want
to see it.

~~~
616c
It's all fun and games until you mirror the IMAP folder structure (what you
sync with server) with local folders, break your Mac, and then import them
into a new Mac and have to keep it all straight.

Or you have to make a PST export on a Mac and do it on a PC? Given my job, I
am relieved but terrified I have not even had to worry about it. I just looked
it up and chuckled. Not a surprise this will screw you.

[http://answers.microsoft.com/en-
us/mac/forum/macoffice2011-m...](http://answers.microsoft.com/en-
us/mac/forum/macoffice2011-macoutlook/can-i-export-outlook-for-mac-file-into-
outlook-for/b505a2cc-6997-47f7-9e87-4ff57e17d97d?auth=1)

Again, I said this before in another thread and stood in the middle of a minor
flame. All email clients suck more than mutt.

Do I love mutt? Not so much. But the developers have the serenity to accept
that which they cannot change, and that the whole charade blows. (Does a day
go by where we do not pounce on those who propose secure email, as a protocol
and system? Forget the clients even.) That, and I have low self-esteem and
relate to people who poke fun at themselves for sucking a little less since
the beginning. [0]

To relate it to a real technical issue. Mutt tries to be as nothing as
possible, in terms of feature set and use case, while Outlook/Thunderbird/fat
clients try to be everything.

Someone likened Outlook to Emacs (which I love ironically), which I would say
is true with a caveat. Something as intimate as correspondence and personal
communication programming needs to be powerfully extensible and customizable,
and none of the fat clients have good interfaces for that. Not even mutt does
easily, and this is the core of the problem.

Show me a world where everyone uses the same ink, pen, and paper to draft dead
tree letters in the exactly style and preference and we can find an email that
does not suck.

(Hint: there never was one and never will be! Let the downvotes descend upon
me!)

[0] [http://www.mutt.org/](http://www.mutt.org/) I pray they never change this
beautiful site and its header.

~~~
andrey_utkin
Greg Kroah-Hartman told me on LKML: "try mutt, you won't regret". I did try,
and I don't regret indeed - I migrated to it :)

~~~
616c
Well, certainly he would agree. MS devs who needed to patch the Linux kernel
could not even get Outlook to do git-patch properly, as the old Linus anecdote
went.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9814276/git-patch-file-
at...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9814276/git-patch-file-attached-to-
outlook-email-gets-modified-by-it)

------
captn3m0
A friend uses MailMate[0]. It seems to be a bit pricey (50 USD), but
considering it shot the fundraising campaign for the next release by 170%[1],
I'm sure there are fans here.

[0]: [https://freron.com/](https://freron.com/)

[1]: [https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mailmate-2-0-the-email-
cl...](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mailmate-2-0-the-email-client-for-
the-rest-of-us#/)

~~~
aeonflux
I use this app every day and never heard about the campaign. I guess their
marking wasn't really top notch, which even makes the shot even more
impressing.

------
sorahn
> My kingdom for a unified inbox and a Mac app. I would never leave Google
> Inbox again. It’s almost perfect – stable, amazing Google-powered search,
> snoozing by time and location, all the bells and whistles.

I've used Fluid.app[1] to create 'standalone applications' of webpages. It's
always worked great, and is almost what the OP is asking for for 'inbox'.

[1][http://fluidapp.com/](http://fluidapp.com/)

~~~
wbthomason
There's also Wmail[1], which I've been using for the past few months. It's
essentially just an Electron wrapper around the web app, with all that
entails. It's worked fairly well for me, though, and enables easier inbox
switching.

[1]: [http://thomas101.github.io/wmail/](http://thomas101.github.io/wmail/)

~~~
schneidmaster
Huh. Thanks for posting this, I actually hadn't heard of it. It avoids some of
my complaints about Boxy[1]; I'll have to give it a try.

[1]: [http://www.boxyapp.co/](http://www.boxyapp.co/)

~~~
wbthomason
Great, I hope it works for you!

------
thallukrish
I feel Email has evolved organically since eons and what we have today is like
the way humans have evolved over millions of years. While the standard look
and feel remains the same pretty much, it has become one's identity for
receiving messages on the web of all forms and types, of all needs from
commerce to friends to business.

It is also a database of all our past communications. Apart that mobile adds
further complexity. It is likely that any one answer for it can miss out
things in the enthusiasm to bring out a simpler version or in the over-
enthusiasm to make it complicated than what it should.

It is hard to quantify the "needs" as it caters to a wide audience as a one
stop answer. Slack like app can take away the professional side, or a Facebook
can take away the social side, but no matter what, you still need a email as
it serves as the identity to reach out for the Web applications.

So whoever is building a new email App needs to keep all of this in mind and
come out with something nifty yet powerful.

------
criddell
This is off topic, but the typeface in that article looks terrible in Firefox
on Windows 8.1. All of the lower case e's are missing the horizontal line:

[http://imgur.com/ShUxi15](http://imgur.com/ShUxi15)

Does it look okay in your browser?

~~~
schneidmaster
Hmmm that's not great. It looks fine for me in Firefox/Chrome on Mac. The base
font is a Google webfont though (Merriweather) and sometimes I see those have
random rendering problems for whatever reason.

~~~
speeder
I use palemoon. They are right now extremely upset that Google fonts is buggy,
doesn't comply to standards, and Google not only refuses to fix it, but keep
making changes that break palemoon workarounds. the project lead has seemly in
the past months working more to create google font workarounds than on the
rest of the browser.

~~~
schneidmaster
This doesn't really surprise me. I should really download the ttf's and such
and font-face it myself. My blog is built on a Jekyll theme that I lightly
modified and as I recall didn't mess with the fonts at all.

------
aeonflux
I tried all mentioned in the post and comments. I am currently using MailMate
([https://freron.com/](https://freron.com/)) It is still lacking, but does
most of the things I personally need.

------
free2rhyme214
I've used Gmail since 2004, when they had invites and everyone wanted one. I
use Outlook for iOS at work and think it's great, although there's issues
getting signatures to transfer when your company uses Sharepoint.

Email is a non issue for most people because most people just use a web
browser and a mobile app. For the record, I wasn't impressed with Outlook for
the Mac.

------
xavi
On the other hand iOS doesn't really support the use of alternatives to the
built-in Mail app. I was trying Google Inbox in a new iPad where I didn't
configure the built-in Mail, but then I wanted to mail a link to a web page
from Safari and I couldn't. It seems is not possible to tell iOS or Safari
that I want my emails to be sent through Inbox :(

~~~
JimDabell
> I was trying Google Inbox in a new iPad where I didn't configure the built-
> in Mail, but then I wanted to mail a link to a web page from Safari and I
> couldn't.

Sure you can – tap on the share button, then scroll to the Gmail icon and tap
on it. A new email will be started in the Gmail application containing the
page title and URL.

If you don't see the Gmail icon straight away, scroll to the end of the list,
and tap on More… to add Gmail to the list.

------
chasing
Every time I experiment with a new e-mail client, I return fairly quickly to
Mail.app.

I like Mail.app.

Maybe that's a personal deficiency.

~~~
tomelders
Give me a decent way to digg out and manage attachments and I'd be over the
moon.

~~~
AdieuToLogic
As far as digging out attachments across multiple messages in Mail.app
(described here[0]):

\- Select a group of messages (could be Command-A in a smart folder, for
example).

\- Then choose "File -> Save Attachments..."

\- Finally, choose or create a directory where you'd like the attachments to
reside.

As for managing them, I would imagine that would vary for each person in how
they like to work and what they seek to accomplish.

0 - [http://email.about.com/od/macosxmailtips/qt/How-to-Save-
All-...](http://email.about.com/od/macosxmailtips/qt/How-to-Save-All-
Attachments-from-Multiple-Emails-Fast-in-OS-X-Mail.htm)

------
jackreichert
I tried most of the ones on the list. I'm currently using
[Spark]([https://sparkmailapp.com/](https://sparkmailapp.com/)) not as buggy
as Airmail, mailbox many of the features I liked from both.

~~~
schneidmaster
I've tried Spark too; I kind've slotted it under the "others" in the "needs
Mac app" category. I didn't really feel it did anything better than EasilyDo
Mail (which has more personal assistant type features) or Boxer (which is more
customizable) if I was going to go for an app on iOS only.

------
pvinis
While I also think email apps are not great, especially when trying to find a
unified experience with macOS and iOS, I think CloudMagic for iOS is pretty
good and Nylas N1 for macOS is also very good. maybe if N1 comes to iOS..

~~~
dvcc
Nylas is pretty bug-ridden at this point, and they have committed to a pretty
crazy pricing model ($7 per month). It's hard to get behind it.

~~~
schneidmaster
> they have committed to a pretty crazy pricing model ($7 per month)

I actually sort of prefer email apps with this sort of pricing model; it makes
me think they're trying to be financially sustainable rather than just getting
acquihired in a year or two. I would definitely pay $7/mo for the right email
app. (But I don't know if N1 is it; I added N1 and some other Mac-only email
apps to the original article.)

------
carsongross
The problem is the economics of non-SAS applications: getting an email client
right is hard and the free alternatives are good enough for plebe-tier users.
$4.99 a one-time pop isn't going to get it done.

------
binaryanomaly
I'm pretty happy...

OSX: Mail.app does the job very well, little bloat.

Linux: I like Geary. Lean but not as good as Mail.app though

Windows: Mailbird. Light but also not as good as Mail.app

For Business I have Outlook.

None is perfect but all do what I need in the corresponding context.

------
SmileyKeith
Here's another new one to try [http://dejalu.me/](http://dejalu.me/) (from one
of the creators of Sparrow)

------
na85
Can one use k9 with Gmail? I've never tried.

~~~
616c
Yes. I do for Google Apps now for years. Why I love it, server-side IMAP
search, which means you use server-side search not the Gmail way, but as part
of the IMAP protocol.

Is it as fast and perfect? No. But I do not have to store so much damn email
or increase the efficiency of Gmail's real-time tracking of my butt all over
the world.

------
kebolio
Geary is actually quite a nice e-mail client to use if you use GNOME or
something close to GNOME (Unity, Cinnamon, Pantheon).

------
draw_down
I just use gmail, it seems ok to me.

------
chillaxtian
just use mail.app

------
awesomerobot
email by definition sucks

~~~
mrweasel
Why? I haven't seen a single alternative, ever, that comes close to providing
the flexibility, versatility or openness of email. Despite the ability to be
pretty much what ever you want it to be, it's still a remarkable simple
protocol.

Really the only thing email is lacking is good end-to-end encryption.

People suck at writing emails though. I partially blame Outlook, but also the
unwillingness to wanting to read and write well. So much of the hassle of
email has to do with volume and the sender not re-reading their writing before
hitting send.

~~~
grinich
If you're looking for a modern integration with PGP, you might consider
checking out the recent update of N1. More on that here:
[https://nylas.com/blog/pgp](https://nylas.com/blog/pgp) (I work at Nylas.)

